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I've been trying to do strikethrough with Unicode. I'm finding that the composed characters are to the right of where they "should" be, and somewhat too low, see the examples on our article, and in the combining character article, these are not in the correct position to be a traditional strikethrough. In fact the tools I've used work best if the struck through text is preceded with a "space strikethrough" (and no strikethrough at the end?). Is there a better solution in Unicode?
All the best: RichFarmbrough 21:00, 21 May 2024 (UTC).[reply]
Implementations of combining characters tend to be plagued by bugs. The precise appearance, including positioning and kerning, is not regulated by Unicode but by the rendering engine of the browser, using its font tables for the specific font. Here are examples of plain and struck-through vertical bars in a few typefaces, using U+0335.
Times New Roman:
||||||||||
|̵|̵|̵|̵|̵|̵|̵|̵|̵|̵
Courier:
||||||||||
|̵|̵|̵|̵|̵|̵|̵|̵|̵|̵
Courier New:
||||||||||
|̵|̵|̵|̵|̵|̵|̵|̵|̵|̵
Comic Sans MS:
||||||||||
|̵|̵|̵|̵|̵|̵|̵|̵|̵|̵
For me, using Firefox on macOS, the effects are quite varied across these fonts. Using Safari, the effects are also varied, but markedly different. The widths of ⟨|⟩ and ⟨|̵⟩ differ for each typeface on Safari. The struck-through bars are narrower for Comic Sans MS. Not only are they 226% (!) wider than the vanilla bars in Times New Roman, but they are even 33% taller, which I find quite bizarre. --Lambiam 10:40, 22 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'm working on a project that would go lot more smoothly if I could get myself organized. What I've got is pieces of text that I need to be able to classify in various ways and apply attribute tags to (e.g. this text has the tags applied for "Religion" and "Finances" while this other one has only "Animals", etc.). I would normally use Excel for something of this scale, but the text pieces aren't really appropriate for stuffing into a cell (and some have particular formatting I'd like to preserve, which again doesn't work great with Excel). At this point, my plan is to indeed do it in Excel, but hyperlink the text pieces, which is clunky at best. Any other options that spring to mind? There will be hundreds of records, which is large enough to need organization, but not zillions and zillions and it's a personal project, so I'm not looking to spend a lot. Any programs spring to mind as appropriate? Matt Deres (talk) 14:58, 23 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
You could run a local copy of MediaWiki (the operation of which you are already very familiar), using categories for the classification. It's an issue if you want to produce automated reports (e.g. "list all the text that is in category X"), but a small php script should be able to do that. -- Finlay McWalter··–·Talk 21:44, 23 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I would personally use MediaWiki. It is easy to install and use. But, you are describing a common use-case for NoSQL databases. 75.136.148.8 (talk) 11:19, 24 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Are these pieces of text each in separate files, or in one large file, or are they divided across several files, some of which contain several classifiable items? Almost all approaches require that you already have, or create, a unique identifier for each item you want to classify. Suppose you are done with the job of classifying. Presumably you want to make some use of the fruits of your labour. What kind of searches/queries/other uses do you envisage? The best approaches may depend on the answers. There is a risk of us trying to solve an XY problem. --Lambiam 11:55, 24 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Fair questions. The use case is for organizing folklore snippets in such a way that I can 1) keep them organized, 2) apply different kinds of tags to them (source location, source date, topics, etc.) for ease of grouping them in various ways, and 3) ideally find ways to connect related bits (e.g. this piece and that piece are likely variations on the same theme). Some of the snippets are literally on scraps of paper, others are from printed sources, still others are from online sources (documents, web sites), and some are audio files I'll need to transcribe. My earlier point about formatting being important is because, especially for the transcriptions of the audio stuff, I'd like to be able to show stresses, pauses, emphasized words or phrases, that kind of thing. Nothing crazy (italics and bolding, mostly), but Excel's ability to word process within a cell is extremely rudimentary; it's just not meant for that work. Matt Deres (talk) 17:13, 24 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It appears to me that the lion's share of the effort will be in labeling (with unique identifiers) and archiving the snippets in a way that allows you to retrieve them by their labels. If you scan or transcribe the items, you can store them as files with the labels as file names. The system for associating attribute tags with the item labels can then be purely (vanilla ASCII) text-based, whether an Excel work sheet or a database. TerminusDB, a free document-oriented database, should be eminently suitable for your purpose. While perhaps overkill for the immediate future, investing effort in becoming acquainted with its use may pay off in the end as your collection grows and your investigations become more sophisticated. --Lambiam 07:01, 25 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
You might consider Obsidian (software), which supports tags [1]. But see also the various links and lists under "see also" on that page, and the categories. Personal wiki software, note taking software, there's a lot available. Card Zero (talk) 07:20, 25 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Org mode has sufficed for me, but maybe you need something fancier for more complicated info. The general approach is Zettelkasten and there is a lot different software for it, none of which I've used. 2601:644:8501:AAF0:0:0:0:1ECE (talk) 05:08, 1 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
What's the name for the blown up texts so common in social media?edit
In social media, many simple texts go viral which have nothing special other than they are blown up to a picture. People may forward them because (a) it's dead easy and (b) they find them funny or they want to proselytize the expressed opinion to others. What are they called? You might consider them a subgroup of internet memes. However, they don't fit the definition “Two central attributes of Internet memes are creative reproduction and intertextuality.”, nor do they contain any other noteworthy creativity. Their only purpose seems to be that they're bigger than normal text so that they gather more importance. Even “eye candy” would be too flattering, so I'd rather call them "rectangular attention sinks". Maybe I'd better turn to a sociologist with this question.
Related tech question: Do any social media offer a way to simply filter and ignore these attention sinks? ◅ Sebastian Helm🗨 09:41, 25 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Can you provide any examples of "blown up texts"? Do you mean texts as in a form of online messaging between two people, such as SMS? ―Panamitsu(talk) 10:06, 25 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
For example an image that contains nothing but the text Why's it always “nyc smells like pee” and never “my pee smells like the greatest city in the world” (In this particular case, the image actually contains some user name who may have originally posted this, along with their picture, contrary to what I described above. But I picked this because I found it somewhat witty. And the user name and picture are not important here.) ◅ Sebastian Helm🗨 14:28, 25 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Interesting; I wasn't aware of that term. But that's not the same thing. If you want to transfer the term onto social media, it would have to be some text taken from a longer discussion, rather like people use bold face and capitalization in such discussions as here. The blown up texts of my question do not pull a reader to any source. Even in the case of the “nyc” example which happens to contain something that looks like an author alias and picture, there is no way to jump to the original discussion. So, they're neither “pull” nor “quotes”. ◅ Sebastian Helm🗨 08:21, 26 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
For clarification: pull quotes are pulled from the text, though I guess they are designed to pull you in as well. --142.112.143.8 (talk) 21:24, 26 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Hmm, that seems redundant. Or what would be a non-pull quote, then? ◅ Sebastian Helm🗨 05:08, 27 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Pull quotes (in the original sense of the term) coinhabit the space with the text from which they were pulled, so in a print magazine the quoted passage would typically appear twice on a page: once in the running text, and once standing out on ts own in a blown-up font size. Normal quotes typically appear merely once and usually have the same font size as the surrounding text, or when displayed as a block sometimes a slightly smaller font size. --Lambiam 10:23, 27 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for the explanation. So their name seems to be a misnomer: The non-pull quotes even have more pulling to do, since they have to pull the text from farther away. But that was only a detour from my original questions. Can we turn back to them, please? ◅ Sebastian Helm🗨 15:22, 28 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
English Wikipedia is almost at 1,225,620,000 diffs, increasing at about 1000 every ten minutes or so I'm guessing. Is there a limit to this number in MediaWiki or the underlying software – cognate with the Y2K problem and the like?
(This is a throwaway question that just occurred to me, not a complaint or anything to take seriously or anything that I'm worrying about!) 46.69.215.187 (talk) 17:18, 25 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
MediaWiki stores complete revisions (previous versions stored backwards deltas as diffs, but later versions store the whole revision and computes the diffs) in the REVISION table. The primary key for that is "int unsigned", which in MySql is a 32 bit integer. That's a max of 4,294,967,295; so that would put en.wikipedia at about 1/4 of the way to the limit. I don't know what provision the developers have for the (surely inevitable) case where that becomes an issue.-- Finlay McWalter··–·Talk 18:27, 25 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Ah, that answers my question and provides useful extra reading! Thank you @Finlay McWalter: I'm very grateful for your time and expertise. 46.69.215.187 (talk) 18:34, 25 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The reference document also states that there is a 64-bit integer data type, which is one possible solution. Robert McClenon (talk) 01:12, 26 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I am using Windows 11, and Word for Microsoft 365. My question has to do with the feature to Save Autorecovery information, which saves a copy of each Word document that is open and has been modified within the past 10 (or other user-settable time) minutes. These Autorecovery files are saved in Appdata \ Roaming \ Microsoft \ Word. However, if I look at them as I am editing various Word documents, sometimes I notice that some of them have sizes of 0 KB. I am attaching a screen shot showing a view of the Word folder with four documents having sizes of 0 KB. These files are in fact null files; that is, the 0 KB is correct. The files that I was editing were not null files.
What causes Word to stop creating good Autorecovery files? What I have found I can do is to stop Word (after saving the documents in question to their disk locations), and restart Word. If there is an unexpected stop or unexpected loss of Word functionality, updates to the documents being edited are lost.
Is there technical documentation of the Autorecovery feature? Does anyone know what causes these failures, or how to minimize their occurrence?
Robert McClenon (talk) 03:36, 26 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
What follows is a hunch, although based on Microsoft sources. Buried deep in the menus of office is a way to change the autosave location. [2] Perhaps this will solve the problem. I base that on hints in this otherwise irrelevant page [3]. It has the phrase "the roaming profile has reached its maximum storage limit". What is the Roaming directory? It seems to be to do with making user data accessible across a network. Maybe avoiding the "roaming" will also avoid the zero bytes file issue. Card Zero (talk) 08:24, 26 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you, User:Card Zero. The sources that you have provided are very old, which I think you knew, but they do provide information for an educated guess, which is what you were trying to do. You ask: What is the Roaming directory? That is displayed in the screen shot that occupies too much space just above this discussion. It is a subdirectory of my User directory, and, as you imply, it has something to do with network access, but appears to be an old version of network access. I have changed the directory in which the Autosave is being done,and will see if that accomplishes anything. I think that we are both inferring that what was happening was that the Word subdirectory within the Roaming subdirectory had exceeded some size limit, which would be why the Autorecovery files were being zeroed. You provided some useful information to guess at what to do. Robert McClenon (talk) 16:38, 28 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Yes. A couple of other completely different wild guesses, which I have no time right now to investigate, is that they are lock files (to do with exclusive access to a file in use) or placeholders (when there is no need for an autosave but it is somehow convenient to Word if it can find the appropriate autosave file anyway). Also I really ought to dig the previous similar discussion out of the archives, I forget how it concluded.
Update: I searched the archives, and it turns out I was thinking of the saga of normal.dotm, a different problem you had with Word, although similar in that you lost supposedly saved data after a crash (in that case, template settings). Card Zero (talk) 20:23, 28 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Never mind, I found a Reddit thread with the answer. It's named after Dracut. I once read a novel where the "no resemblance to actual people" disclaimer said that "the characters are placenamed"; apparently some software developers had the same idea. --142.112.143.8 (talk) 05:10, 26 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Ringtone doesn't seem to mention that this is possible but I think it is. I tried finding sources but found nothing that Wikipedia would accept, and even then, nothing seemed to make it clear the concept even existed.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 22:36, 27 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Seems like that is part of the functionality of the software of the phone (iOS/Android), not part of the ringtone itself. Polygnotus (talk) 04:11, 28 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The best place to propose an improvement to any article is the talk page of that article. Shantavira|feed me 08:13, 28 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
As mentioned, it is the phone's software, not the concept of a ringtone. On my phone, I can go into my contact list, select a contact, and set both an image and a ringtone for that contact. Then, when I receive a call from that number, the image I set shows up and the ringtone I set plays. If I haven't set either one, the default image and ringtone are used. So, it is possible to have a ringtone for a specific contact on a phone if the software allows it. It is also possible to have a different ringtone on different phones. It is possible to have a ringtone that plays when you purchase the phone, but then a person changes it later to a different one. It is possible to play a ringtone on a piano without a phone at all. It is possible that a frog may learn to vocalize sounds that mimic a ringtone. A lack of references should indicate that concept of "possible" and "ringtone" is not in itself notable (but I would like to see that frog). 12.116.29.106 (talk) 11:20, 28 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I can't really propose an improvement where I don't have the reliable sources that would support it. That was my purpose in asking here.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 14:30, 28 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
How to search for fake references (in SparQL or with other methods)edit
In SparQL, how can I search for stuff like this. So it would start with an opening square bracket, then a number of up to 3 digits, then a closing square bracket.
Is there a way to do this via the normal search box? Is there another, better way? Thanks! Polygnotus (talk) 04:07, 28 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not familiar with SparQL, but a regular expression that will serve for a search in most query pattern syntaxes is:
\[[0-9]+\]
Thus will also match "[2024]". If 3 is a hard limit on number of digits, this might work:
Thank you. I think that the problem is that the article content itself is not on Wikidata, which means I have to try a different approach. It seems like the search function also does not like regex. So I may have to download a dump and use regex. Polygnotus (talk) 11:24, 28 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I was watching TV the other day and they showed a computer screen with code on it. Normally, I rewind the program to see what language they are using. However, I came across a language I don't recognize. It looks like they are using # signs for comments, CIF to terminate IF blocks, == for testing equality, & and | for compound conditions, = for assignment and maybe line numbers for a couple lines. The TV show was from 1998. What programming language is this? A Quest For Knowledge (talk) 10:15, 30 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
So the oddest part about the language appears to be that it uses indentation for structure, which is known as the off-side rule. That article has a list of potential candidates, but I had a look through and wasn't able to find what's in the image. ―Panamitsu(talk) 11:51, 30 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I've just noticed your remark about CIF, sorry. ―Panamitsu(talk) 11:56, 30 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The code snippet deals with astronomical coordinates and a "beam", which suggests to me that this has to do with radio astronomical data (nothing to do with the story I guess). Some of the statements look like Fortran. The slashes suggested something like ESO-MIDAS, but that doesn't have CIF. In fact, I haven't found anything using CIF, but maybe I've just hit the limits of my google foo. --Wrongfilter (talk) 12:24, 30 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Looks like a newer variant of FORTRAN. If the C of CIF is in the first column then it's a comment. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 12:47, 30 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Here's a second screenshot. Unfortunately, there's some ghosting in the image but you can see that there are nested CIF's. A Quest For Knowledge (talk)
I think I've found it, or at least I've made a development. I've found a language called Cola ( COntrol LAnguage for use with Hermes)[4] which was created(?) in 1994. Here appears to its source code. It is part of some project called the Groningen Image Processing System which "is a highly interactive software system for the reduction and display of astronomical data," which falls in line with Wrongfilter's comment. It has the CIF and also CFOR (my guess is the C stands for close), and generally looks similar, except I can't find anything about what symbols are used to make comments. ―Panamitsu(talk) 12:30, 31 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Excellent! It seems to me that cola uses exclamation marks for comments, but otherwise it is very close. This seems to be based on sheltran, which as far as I understand was a sort of pre-processor for Fortran 77 to allow for a more structured coding style. Makes you wonder how the makers of that TV series found that piece of code. --Wrongfilter (talk) 13:02, 31 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Hi, i'm trying to create a Category for discussion request on Wikimedia Commons but i need to do some work on the proposal itself before i can publish it. Could anyone help me out? I'll much rather ask here than on Commons since the response time here is much faster.
Remove all " (<number> C)" and everything in between them (including the space in front)
Start each entry with ":[[:Category:" and end each entry with "]]"
There are probably some way to automate it but as i said i have no clue how--Trade (talk) 17:19, 30 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I've created a subpage User:Trade/CfD Cristal on Wikimedia Commons – a much easier collaborative communication channel than PasteBin. I have fixed numerous issues (mainly lack of whitespace or the wrong case) that resulted in redlinks. CfD listings of multiple entries commonly use *; therefore I have not replaced * by :.
The usual terminology is to merge categories (such as Category:RED ƎYE Pictures logos) into target categories (such as Category:RED ƎYE logos), which means all category members get reassigned to the target category. So instead of
Considerable head scratching at cppreference.com doesn't tell me whether this array's elements are guaranteed to be initialized to 0. Experimentally they do seem to be, but that could be accidental. In C, of course, int x[10]; makes an array that is uninitialized. Does anyone know? Thanks. 2601:644:8501:AAF0:0:0:0:1ECE (talk) 05:14, 1 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Cplusplus.com saysBy default, regular arrays of local scope (for example, those declared within a function) are left uninitialized. This means that none of its elements are set to any particular value. I don't know what happens in a global scope. ―Panamitsu(talk) 06:33, 1 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
In C, a global array is initialized to zero. (Reference: K&R, or the latest C standard.) I think C++ works the same way: this page from learncpp.com says "Global variables have static duration" and, later, "Unlike local variables, which are uninitialized by default, variables with static duration are zero-initialized by default." This is not very official C++ reference, but has the advantage of actually telling us the answer. And our compatibility of C and C++ article says various things about arrays, but nothing to contradict that the languages work the same in this respect. Card Zero (talk) 07:44, 1 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
A std::array is not a C-style array. It acts similarly in many ways but has some differences.The std::array constructor follows the rules of aggregate initialization. But if there is no initializer list (in braces), default initialization is used. The std::array constructor reference linked above says "note that default initialization may result in indeterminate values for non-class T", and the default initialization reference linked above clarifies that POD types ("plain old data", like int) are uninitialized by default initialization. So for a std::array<T> created without an initialization list, the elements are uninitialized if T is a POD type. If T is a non-POD class, the elements would be initialized with their default constructor. CodeTalker (talk) 05:53, 2 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
But are you disagreeing, or agreeing? We've all agreed the array would be uninitialized if it has local scope. But do you think an int array with global scope (or "static duration" perhaps more relevantly), with default initialization, is uninitialized? Your links led me to zero initialization, but I still don't see a definitive answer on this site. Presumably it is telling us, in its way.
Zero-initialization is performed in the following situations: 1) For every named variable with static or thread-local(since C++11) storage duration that is not subject to constant initialization, before any other initialization.
Maybe that means global arrays are initialized to zero, but due to uncertainties about what very formally specified thing in the reference relates to what familiar thing in practice, I can't be sure. Is a global array a variable? Does it have static storage? Fairly sure of the latter, less certain of the former.
Perhaps you weren't disagreeing, but just elaborating: we have the new wrinkle that uninitialized non-POD types get a default initialization, even at local scope. Card Zero (talk) 08:22, 2 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
As I read it, the elements are not guaranteed to be initialized. For reference, I'm using final C++23 draft; the numbers in parentheses are the relevant locations in the draft.
First off, only the pointer has static storage. The array has dynamic storage, having been created by a new-expression (7.6.2.8 (9)). What happens from there is, well, complicated.
An allocation function may be called to obtain storage (7.6.2.8 (11-13)); if so, the state of the memory thus returned is unspecified (6.7.5.5.2 (2)).
Now, the expression has no new-initializer, so the result is default-initialized (7.6.2.8 (23.1)).
Default-initialization means that the best applicable constructor for the initializer () (chosen via overload resolution) is called with an empty argument list to initialize the class (9.4.1 (7.1)).
The array class is an aggregate, and uses the implicitly-declared default constructor (24.3.7.2 (1)).
This performs whatever initializations that would be performed by a user-written default constructor with no ctor-initializer and an empty compound-statement (basically, a constructor that doesn't specify anything) (11.4.5.2 (4)).
Not actually knowing precisely what the data members contained are or how they are specified, we are stuck here. There is nothing preventing an implementation from, for instance, storing the data in an array specified with a default member initializer (see 11.9.3 (9.1)) of {142857, -32768}. IF one assumes that the class holds an array of 10 ints with no initializer specified (which seems more likely), that array is itself default-initialized (11.9.3 (9.3)); each element thereof is then also default-initialized (9.4.1 (7.2)). For an int, default-initialization performs no initialization (9.4.1 (7.3)), and we are left with whatever was in the memory we were allocated.
There are many cases: heap/local/static, POD/non-POD, and created with or without an initializer. The OP was asking about a std::array<int> (POD) on the heap with no initializer. Such a variable is not guaranteed to be zero-initialized. The same is true if local rather than heap but a static would be zero-initialized. In all these cases, non-PODs would be initialized by the class's default constructor. Heap variables may be default initialized if no initializer is given (uninitialized if POD or default constructed if non-POD) as in the OP's example, or value initialized if given an empty initializer (zero if POD or default constructed if non-POD).So, to enumerate the cases: // --- static; no initializer static std::array<int,10> a; // initialized to 0 static std::array<MyClass,10> a; // initialized by MyClass::MyClass() // --- static; empty initializer (same as previous case) static std::array<int,10> a{}; // initialized to 0 static std::array<MyClass,10> a{}; // initialized by MyClass::MyClass() // --- local; no initializer std::array<int,10> a; // uninitialized std::array<MyClass,10> a; // initialized by MyClass::MyClass() // --- local; empty initializer std::array<int,10> a{}; // initialized to 0 std::array<MyClass,10> a{}; // initialized by MyClass::MyClass() // --- heap; no initializer std::array<int,10> *a = new std::array<int,10>; // default initialized (uninitialized) std::array<MyClass,10> *a = new std::array<MyClass,10>; // default initialized: initialized by MyClass::MyClass(); // --- heap; empty initializer std::array<int,10> *a = new std::array<int,10>(); // value initialized (set to zero) std::array<MyClass,10> *a = new std::array<MyClass,10>(); // value initialized: also initialized by MyClass::MyClass(); BTW, the "experiment" by which the OP found their array to be set to zero would be better done by deliberately unzeroing the heap first, by something like std::array<int,100> *z = new std::array<int,100>; for (int i = 0; i < 100; ++i) (*z)[i] = 0xffffffff; delete z;
This is not definitive but it makes it more likely that the next thing allocated from the heap doesn't use fresh system-allocated memory, which might indeed be all zeros. CodeTalker (talk) 17:37, 2 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Fingerprint, Identification key, Recipe, Answer file, INI file, Bibliographic Recordedit
A couple of examples for context:
ccache "cachescompilations so that ... the same compilation can be avoided and the results can be taken from the cache... by hashing different kinds of information that should be unique for the compilation and then using the hash sum to identify the cached output."
Saving a copy of an online webpage from within a Web Browser (File > Save Page As...)
What is the word for a set of parameters which attribute to an instance/snapshot the information required for it's reproduction?
In the examples above, ccache utilises "different kinds of information that should be unique for the compilation", similarly if I save a webpage from within a Web Browser, the only way for someone to be guaranteed to independently replicate the same file would be for the same URI to be accessed by the same version of the Web Browser with the same configuration (e.g. javascript enabled/disabled, identical installation+configuration of extensions which affect page retrieval/rendering) on the same Operating System with the same configuration.
In the case of ccache, the compiler version and flags are some factors of the "information that should be unique for the compilation", and during recompilation inputting the same selection of information results in an identical hash and therefore a cache match. But what is the word to describe the information being input?
I'm not looking for a generic word like "metadata".
Some words I thought of which seemed to be candidate answers were:
Fingerprint (computing) - However fingerprint refers to an algorithmic output (e.g. ccache 'hash') whereas I am wanting to refer to the inputs, which the article simply defines as "a procedure that maps an arbitrarily large data item (such as a computer file) to a much shorter bit string, its fingerprint".
Key (cryptography) - This seemed very close, except that in the case of cryptography it is described as "a piece of information" whereas I am looking for a word to refer to a "set of information".
Identification key - "aids the identification of biological entities", rather than describing the parameters of the entities creation.
INI file - "a text-based content with a structure and syntax comprising key–value pairs for properties, and sections that organize the properties", so what would be the name of the section?
Answer file - Contains the data that is essentially what I am describing, except that an answer file is context-specific to computer program installation.
Recipe - Are configurations equivalent to 'ingredients'? I would have thought a recipe would include much more detail that just application version numbers and parameters.
Bibliographic record - This seems the most relevant as a name for the set of reproduction parameters, except that it is context-specific to library science.
Exif - Again, very similar, but the set of parameters is just referred to as EXIF metadata or tags.
User Agent/Generator - This is part of the information which would be included in the set.
Would the correct generic word for "a set of parameters which attribute to an instance/snapshot" be the 'profile', which is then qualified with the context-specific word 'generator'?
Therefore making the "set of parameters which attribute to an instance/snapshot the information required for it's reproduction" the 'generator profile'?
If so, what would be the "different kinds of information that should be unique for the compilation" used by ccache? the 'compilation profile'? So then the ccache article would be appropriately updated with "the next time compilation of the same project using the same compiler with the same compilation profile is attempted, the same compilation can be avoided and the results can be taken from the cache. Mattmill30 (talk) 17:27, 2 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
In the case of saving a copy of the same Webpage from multiple Web Browsers, a Unique identifier would be necessary in distinguishing between the multiple copies.
e.g. you could append the name of the Web Browser to the filename, or in the case of multiple copies of a webpage from different versions of the same Web Browser then using the Installation GUID, etc.
However, that wouldn't provide information specific enough to facilitate reproduction, or enable identification of other copies/instances of a particular resource which was generated using an identical system configuration.
Did my earlier response to myself provide clarity to my question?
If my question is still unclear, I can construct an example "solution" which may provide clarity Mattmill30 (talk) 18:19, 2 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Wikipedia pages have a revision ID. That of the version of this page, after you posted your question, is 1226936970 Can I use it to reconstruct a screenshot of what you saw? No. I don't know if you used a laptop or a smartphone. Suppose I know you used a MacBook. Which type of many types? Which size of screen? Produced in which year? (This makes a differences for some types.) Which release of macOS were you using, and which version of that release? Likewise, not only which browser, but also which version? Did your browser have customizations? Was the window full-screen? If not, what were its sizes? How far up or down was the page scrolled, and at which zoom level was it being viewed? Did you watch in dark mode? Knowing all this may still not be enough for a faithful reconstruction of what you saw. Only a screenshot will do. --Lambiam 06:08, 3 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
See Sexual desire and various other related articles, which you could have found easily by putting 'responsive desire' into the search box of this encyclopedia. You often post similar nonproductive responses to things which you personally have not heard of, although many others have: it becomes tedious. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.2.67.173 (talk) 11:58, 20 May 2024 (UTC)
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To be fair, there was a non-zero chance that it referred to a responsive to spontaneous change in the desire to fight strangers. Sean.hoyland (talk) 13:01, 20 May 2024 (UTC)
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Theoretically. The funny thing is that the first sentence of 94.2.67.173's lecture to me could just as easily have served as a direct response to the poster. (Though maybe that was the point anyway!) ←Baseball BugsWhat's up, Doc?carrots→ 14:40, 20 May 2024 (UTC) [reply]
You may be thinking of the DRD5 gene, where some alleles are thought to be involved in spontaneity or lack thereof. Abductive (reasoning) 11:15, 20 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Our article doesn't mention that, but implicates it in everything else: learning and memory, addiction, smoking, ADHD, Parkinson's disease, schizophrenia, locomotion, regulation of blood pressure, and immunity. What a busy gene. I guess you're referencing something along the lines of dopamine being important for the will to initiate movement, like in Awakenings. Card Zero (talk) 21:32, 20 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
According to this review article, "of the few studies on T[estosterone] and desire in healthy women ... dyadic desire [desire in sex with a partner] has shown null or negative correlations with T". This suggests it is unlikely to achieve the specific effect. --Lambiam 08:58, 21 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I bet those 2 Gregory Cochrans are the same.Rich (talk) 02:27, 21 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
You're correct: they each are "co-author of the book The 10,000 Year Explosion." That Edge link could be used as a source for updating the article. --136.54.106.120 (talk) 05:57, 21 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I wonder how often two people of the same name have written a book together. There must be some examples of father and son. —Tamfang (talk) 21:20, 30 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Butterflies of Daviess County, KY (Papilionidae)edit
In Daviess County, Kentucky (or generally along the Ohio River or within a reasonable distance south thereof), how late in the year was the latest-ever sighting of Papilio glaucus? (Here in Central California, all tiger swallowtail species disappear in the first days of September -- my latest confirmed sighting of P. multicaudata was on September 1, and of P. rutulus on September 4 -- is it more-or-less the same over there?) Asking for a local and/or an expert -- and no pictures, please! 2601:646:8082:BA0:250E:98C8:7461:C819 (talk) 02:48, 21 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The pool of active RefDesk editors is quite small and is spread around the Anglosphere (or sometimes outside of it), so finding anyone from that locality or an entomologist here is a bit unlikely. A Google search only found backyardecology.net - Eastern Tiger Swallowtail Butterflies (with pictures) which says: "In Kentucky, we typically see the adults flying from April until September". Alansplodge (talk) 14:33, 21 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks, but I was hoping for a bit more detail -- do they fly until early September (like their close relatives here in California), or until the end of September, or what? (The reason why I ask is, a friend of mine is over there on a farm caring for a sick relative, and I want to come over and help her with the farm itself, but at the same time I want to avoid any chance of a close encounter with one of those creepy critters out in the open (I think I told you more than once before how I feel about the Eastern tiger and about any other butterfly that looks like it -- with the exception of P. canadensis and P. machaon because they're nice and small, and also P. zelicaon because it's not only small but also its stripes are barely visible)! But I think since they only hatch in April (here in California I see P. rutulus beginning in mid-March), they shouldn't be flying any later in the year than they do here, so I should be "safe" beginning with the second week of September! (And just to be clear, other swallowtails like Papilio troilus are perfectly fine by me -- only tiger-striped ones aren't!) 2601:646:8082:BA0:A400:D9D:C5FD:AB24 (talk) 03:44, 24 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Broadening the topic somewhat, you might be interested (if you aren't already familiar with it) by the subject of Phenology. Climate change is obviously having a large influence on previously reliable annual timings of natural phenomena: in my part of the world (southern England), many trees are blooming, etc., up to a month earlier than a few decades ago. Doubtless the emergence, migrations and numbers of annual broods of insects are also changing, so they can appear later as well as earlier. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.2.67.173 (talk) 09:57, 22 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Try calling 270-684-0211, the main number for the county public library in Owensboro. (Lest you embarrass yourself — be aware that the county name is pronounced "Davis", not "Davey's" or "Davy-ess".) Unfortunately their website's "contact" page, https://www.dcplibrary.org/contact, doesn't give either an email address or a form to write a help request. Nyttend (talk) 02:18, 23 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks, but I just had a better idea -- is there a zoo and/or a university in Owensboro? Because if so, I think I'll try asking them (and if not, then I'll try Louisville -- the climate is more-or-less the same there, so these critters should disappear at about the same time in both places!) 2601:646:8082:BA0:C564:9993:1EA4:838E (talk) 23:17, 24 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Pseudouridine - why is it the fifth nucleotide?edit
I saw that in the scientific literature, pseudouridine is considered the fifth nucleotide. For example:[5], [6]. My question is why is it called the fifth and not the sixth? To the best of my knowledge, when pseudouridine was discovered in the 1950's, the known nucleotides were: A,C,T,G,U = five nucleotides. So why isn't pseudouridine the sixth nucleotide? Thanks 2A01:6500:A042:E52F:970A:37C0:5DE7:C30E (talk) 11:25, 21 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The original paper seems to be the 1956 publication doi:10.1016/S0021-9258(18)70770-9 which, in Table 1, shows they only considered A,G,C and U as known in RNA at that time. Mike Turnbull (talk) 15:22, 21 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I have been looking for a reference for studies to find evidence of a physical empath, meaning a person who experiences physical pain that those around him or her are experiencing. I can find a plethora of web pages claiming empathy is real. I'm not looking for silly web pages. I'm trying to find scientific studies. So far, I only found ones about emotional empathy, not physical empathy. 75.136.148.8 (talk) 18:29, 22 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Unsure, however, if that satisfies your perception of "evidence of a physical empath". The neuroscience of empathy shows that observing others in pain can activate similar neural networks involved in experiencing pain firsthand.
Thanks. I can get "I Feel Your Pain" from another local branch. That should work well. 75.136.148.8 (talk) 11:15, 23 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Why does the northern hemisphere have two subtropical jets?edit
There are normally two subtropical jet streams in the winter northern hemisphere (e.g Fig12), one over Africa-Asia-North Pacific and the other over North America-North Atlantic. Why is that so? Maybe the cold Sahara/Canary Current and California Current yield the gaps? JoJo Eumerus mobile (main talk) 18:55, 22 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Where do you see two subtropical jets? One of them is subtropical jet and the second is polar jet. Ruslik_Zero 19:13, 22 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Africa-Asia-North Pacific and the other over North America-North Atlantic They are not connected, and they both start in the subtropics. I am talking about east-west gaps, not north-south gaps. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 07:07, 23 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
What is outer space "outer" of? Is it "the region beyond Earth's sky" (i.e. the atmosphere) mentioned in outer space#terminology? I tried visiting Inner space, but it's a disambiguation page with no relevant results. Nyttend (talk) 02:14, 23 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
There isn't a firm boundary for outer space, as atmospheric pressure exponentially decreases with altitude above Earth's surface (see scale height) and thus the exosphere blends into space rather than suddenly vanishing into a vacuum. The lead section of outer space gives at least one boundary defined by convention, and the body states that the density of atmospheric gas gradually decreases with distance from the object until it becomes indistinguishable from outer space; this need not occur at a fixed altitude even if we assume a constant pressure for the interplanetary medium (or threshold above it). I guess we could then say that outer space is "outer" to the region with a significantly higher density/pressure with respect to the interplanetary medium, or more simply, "outer" to any measurable atmosphere of a planet.
I've also never heard the term "inner space" in the context of planetary science. Complex/Rational 02:38, 23 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
One arrives at inner space by sitting and meditating, not by visiting a website. (Cue one of my frequent dad jokes: "My son has taken up meditation. Well, at least he's not just sitting around doing nothing".) -- Jack of Oz[pleasantries] 23:13, 23 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Kármán line may be of interest. I don't think the term 'outer space' ever had a physical 'inner' counterpart. As a term for the mental realms, however, 'inner space' was often used in explicit opposition to 'outer space' in discussions of the 'New Wave' of Science Fiction writing in the 1960s and later (see Inner space (science fiction)). {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.2.67.173 (talk) 00:02, 24 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Contrasting with outer space, there's also near space, which redirects to mesosphere. PiusImpavidus (talk) 07:34, 24 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
What's the point of being enamored by one symmetric face and bored by an equally symmetric one?edit
Why should evolution give them such a wide range from meh to gobsmacking? Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 05:16, 23 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
You are potentially ascribing too much intent, if rhetorical or metaphorical, to the process. Sometimes there are just spandrels. Remsense诉 05:29, 23 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
If hunter gatherers lived in population densities under 1 per square mile and only saw one band of unrelated humans at a time and only about 75 were female and a fairly large percent were too young or too old with the stage 1 population pyramid and some of the rest aren't attracted to you and some you can't stand to live with long-term or almost and some can't stand you either then what's the point of some females being far more beautiful than others to specific men all other things being equal? Or it increased group harmony vs if beauty was less in the eye of the beholder? Less discord at least if not fights over women. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 00:43, 24 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
This question doesn't seem like it has an answer, because you are ascribing too much intent to conceptual abstractions. Remsense诉 01:04, 24 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It's nice that the last line in that article is the 'what the...?' cliffhanger "Some evidence suggests that face preferences in adults might be correlated to infections in childhood..." with the cited source saying "...frequency of diarrhea in particular". Sean.hoyland (talk) 06:40, 23 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The word "bored" seems to have taken on some strange new meaning. I see people on social media saying stuff like "I was bored out of my skull so I came here ..." (= "I'm only here because I'm desperate"). If that isn't the greatest insult to their fellow socialmediaists, I don't know what would be. Contrary to the OP's title, being indifferent to something does not equate to being bored by it. One would have to spend some considerable time focussing on the object in question to get to the point of being bored by it, but that is the exact opposite of being so unimpressed by the object that one moves on immediately to something potentially more interesting. -- Jack of Oz[pleasantries] 23:09, 23 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I think this sense of "bored" develops when one views a range of examples in aggregate such that they constitute one experience. Remsense诉 23:17, 23 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
While the article on Aluminum talks about the fact that Aluminum wasn't really separated into pure or near-pure form until the 19th century, there doesn't seem to be an obvious reason given? Is it *somehow* tied to the other odd characteristic of Alumnimum, that when it oxidizes it goes the opposite way from Iron Oxide and flaking.Naraht (talk) 03:35, 24 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
This has to do with the fact that aluminum forms such a strong bond with oxygen that it can only be reduced to the metal by means of electrolysis or thermite process (plus the fact that, as also with zinc and a few other metals, the melting point of the oxide is higher than the boiling point of the metal, so some way of reducing the former must be used to prevent the metal from simply boiling away). 2601:646:8082:BA0:A400:D9D:C5FD:AB24 (talk) 03:55, 24 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Is it that odd to have a non-spalling oxide? In ultradry pure oxygen (partial pressure of H2O ≤2×10−5 mmHg), even Li, Na, and K passivate (cite: Russell and Lee's book on nonferrous metals). :) Double sharp (talk) 12:51, 24 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Neither the Hall–Héroult process article nor the links given immediately above seem to explain it as clearly as the comparison between Melting point of Aluminum oxide vs. boiling point of alumninum metal mentioned by the first poster. I'm sure it is somewhat more complex than that, but that would seem to be an incredibly difficult. I think the *first* statement is equivalent to basically that 6 Na + 2 AlO3 doesn't lead to 3 Na2O + 2 Al. (or any of the other Alkali Metals)Naraht (talk) 23:13, 30 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The Hall–Héroult process utilizes electrolysis; prior to the advent of electricity, extraction of aluminum was more difficult and expensive. 136.54.106.120 (talk) 04:49, 31 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
For the compounds with hexavalent chromium and heptavalent manganese (or the high oxidation states of other transition metals, such as hexavalent molybdenum, heptavalent technetium, hexavalent tungsten, heptavalent rhenium, etc.) and a single chemical element, there are CrO3 and Mn2O7, but CrF6 and MnF7 seem to not exist, but are there CrS3, Mn2S7, CrCl6, MnCl7, etc.? Is O the only element which has compound with only two elements and with high oxidation states of transition metals? +6 is one of the main oxidation state of chromium and +7 is one of the main oxidation state of manganese. 61.224.168.169 (talk) 10:29, 24 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
In general, really high oxidation states require O or F, essentially due to high electronegativity. Cr(VI) and Mn(VII) are high enough to be considered under this rubric. Which one is favoured depends on other factors, e.g. F has higher electronegativity but its monovalency instead of O's divalency leads to steric hindrance being more important. It can go either way: for Os, OsO4 is well-known and OsF8 nonexistent, but for Pt, it's PtF6 that's well-known and PtO3 that's not well-characterised.
I don't think W(VI), for example, is really "high". Of course, it is the highest possible (just count valence electrons), but no one would call Na(I) high either. The early 4d and 5d metals tend to be happier in high oxidation states than their 3d counterparts. MoS3, MoCl6, WS3, WBr6, Tc2S7, and Re2S7 all exist. And WF6 is not even a great oxidising agent, whereas MnF4 is already ferocious (and the highest fluoride, too). Late d-metals are indeed much more oxidising in their highest oxidation states: once you reach Ir and Pt, I would definitely agree that VI is high (PtF6 famously oxidises dioxygen and xenon). But even then you see the pattern, since Co and Ni cannot even get as far as VI. Double sharp (talk) 12:49, 24 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I am not sure what "happy" or "ferocious" mean here. MoS3 and Re2S7 are of course not Mo(VI) nor Re(VII), as inorganic chemists well know. High oxidation states tend to require pi-donor ligands, and oxo (O2-) is generally considered the strongest pi-donor.--Smokefoot (talk) 14:38, 30 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
An anthropomorphic way to indicate their strength as oxidising agents.
My mistake, yes: these sulfides are not really in the group oxidation state. Apologies for the brain fart. (Though it seems that the actual oxidation state in Re2S7 is not so clear.) At least we still have the halides for Mo(VI) and W(VI). I think what I was really trying to get at is that to me, whether an oxidation state is high is more about its oxidising power than about the absolute value, e.g. Ag(III) is high but Cr(III) isn't. Double sharp (talk) 04:04, 31 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The oxygen molecules move around randomly; to react with the fuel they need to bump into it. My guess is that the bump rate only depends on the partial pressure. --Lambiam 05:44, 25 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
An inert gas would still absorb some of the heat from the combustion, lowering the flame temperature. That should suppress the fire somewhat. Actual flame retardants like abovementioned haloalkane aren't inert, but actively suppress the fire with the chemical reactions they undergo when heated or exposed to a flame. PiusImpavidus (talk) 10:21, 25 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Why is there no monosmium octafluoride or moniridium nonafluoride or PtF10?edit
There's crazy ways to make new forms like electrocuting extremely hot plasmas and forcing noble gases to bond or crushing between microdiamonds yet no one's figured out how to make OsF8 or IrF9 but OsO4 could be made with Paleolithic tech (poisonous though). Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 16:58, 26 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The reason will be that there is not enough space to pack that many fluorine atoms around the metal, at a close enough distance to have strong enough bonds. The bond in the hexafluoride would be much stronger, and to add more fluorine, it would have to push out those other fluorine atoms to squeeze new ones in. The energy gain by this would have to exceed that of breaking an F-F bond in F2. Perhaps atomic fluorine could assist in a rare gas matrix, but in warmer conditions F2 would be produced. Perhaps a diamond anvil press could do something, but I have not heard of its use for these. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 21:35, 26 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Under high pressure it should be possible. OsF8 and IrF8 are predicted to be stabilised by 300 GPa, as the 6p orbitals on the metal lower and we have ligand-to-metal charge transfer from F 2p to M 6p. Also TcF7 and CdF3 should stabilise (the former interesting because ReF7 exists at normal conditions and this is one case where Tc and Re differ; the latter interesting for breaking the oxidation state barrier for stable group 12 elements). Double sharp (talk) 05:43, 27 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Re Paleolithic OsO4: an interesting thought, but even the easy metals like Au seem to have been only recognised later per Element discovery. If we want to push it as early as possible, then I think you'd need an early discovery of Pt (accomplished by pre-Columbian South Americans), together with enough alchemical knowledge to get aqua regia to separate out an Os-Ir fraction. Double sharp (talk) 06:44, 27 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Graeme Bartlett: That said, is there a similarly simple explanation for why Rh, Ir, and Pt can reach the VI oxidation state only in fluorides and not oxides? And why is PdVI so elusive despite this oxidation state being well-established for all other PGMs? Double sharp (talk) 07:04, 27 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I will add there is no PdV either. Higher oxidation states get less stable as you move right in the periodic table from W to Pt or Mo to Pd. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 23:36, 28 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks. Reading around, maybe there is no simple answer exactly for why the threshold of impossibility is precisely where it is, so I shall have to be satisfied by this. :) Double sharp (talk) 09:48, 29 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Google Bard tells me it is about electronegativity of fluorine and polarizability of oxygen. Not to be trusted though. High oxidation compounds all seem to be isolated molecules, and not network solids, which would be topologically possible with oxygen. So it seems that more single bonds is more stable than a few double bonds, but up to the limit of about 6 due to not being able to pack in the atoms around the metal. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 11:46, 29 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
This certainly makes sense. And in the 3d series, as expected the limiting coordination number seems even less in some cases: we have CrO3 but only CrF5, and Mn2O7 but only MnF4. Double sharp (talk) 15:24, 29 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Graeme Bartlett, we don't ever use the mono- prefix with the first word of a binary compound's name. CO2 is carbon dioxide, not monocarbon dioxide. Georgia guy (talk) 10:15, 29 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
For actual Ir(IX), there is IrO4+, though this is not "bottlable" stuff. Possibly Pt(X) will be possible too in PtO42+, but that one has not yet been experimentally confirmed. Double sharp (talk) 04:19, 31 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
My heading may be mediocre considering Nasa's simplified definition "The universe is everything. It includes all of space, and all the matter and energy that space contains". So
can there exist two (or more) 'universes' in the same space-time domain?
If yes, can we say the space compromises the universe and not vice-versa?
If no, does that mean all of space is part of 'universe', thus even if mass in form of galaxy, planets etc. is limited in mass and volume, still all of that infinite vacuum that surrounds it is part of 'our universe'?
If there is something far away from our 'observable universe' which did not come out of big bang (considering big bang happened for sure), would that still be considered part of our universe?
Your "if no" option means that empty space is part of the Universe. Far away stuff would be part of the universe. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 21:39, 26 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
You talk of an infinite vacuum that surrounds the universe. That would be absolutely empty space. But everything that exists, even absolutely empty space, is by definition part of the universe. So, either there's some sort of boundary, beyond which there is nothing, not even absolutely empty space - which means there is no "beyond"; or, there is no boundary and the universe is infinitely limitless. Take your pick. -- Jack of Oz[pleasantries] 22:39, 26 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Fairly sure that "absolutely empty space" is, very much by definition, not a "thing" and hence not part of "everything" 2A01:E0A:CBA:BC60:CF2:682A:5D96:ED9D (talk) 07:50, 28 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Mathematicians might disagree with you. Is the empty set, for example, a "thing"? I'd say so. I'll concede that there is some controversy on the point. --Trovatore (talk) 07:58, 28 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Q. Imagine big bang really happened, so by definition that the entire space (our space time domain to be exact) is part of 'our universe', and so that will mean something far away which did not come out of our big bang is still part of 'our universe'; thus meaning that big bang did not necessarily give birth to 'our universe' but just a part of 'our universe'. Also that means 'expansion of universe' would just mean expansion of 'our part of our universe' which is near us and came thru our big bang (and not all universe)? ExclusiveEditorNotify Me! 07:45, 27 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Where is the question in that? Our definition of Universe includes the far away stuff. The definition does not depend on how it was created. You may also be interested in the idea of an inter-penetrating alternate universe that uses the same space. For example a Dark matter world, or perhaps a Counter-Earth, six months out of phase. I can imagine it as a clathrate. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 07:53, 27 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The question is more of terminologies and what words means, than physics itself. But clarifying this helps as to know if the definitions are standardized or still vague. ExclusiveEditorNotify Me! 07:50, 27 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Like many words, people do not always use the term universe to mean the same thing. Usually you can understand from the context which sense is meant. When people say "the universe", they usually mean the totality of space and everything in it that we know to exist or can reasonably expect to exist based on what we know. So the spatial extension of the universe is the totality of space; there is no room for another universe.
Mathematically, you can have several spaces that are in no way connected to each other, so one can imagine there are other universes that occupy other spaces that we have no way of knowing about: we cannot reach them, and voyagers or information from these other universes cannot reach us. Therefore the hypothesis that other universes exist is unfalsifiable and falls outside the realm of science. It is a plot device in science fiction, but then there are portals connecting the universes, so from a definitional point of view one might say they are all part of a universe that is somehow compartmentalized.
Another sense of the term universe, given by the Merriam–Webster dictionary as sense 1c(3), is: "an aggregate of stars comparable to the Milky Way galaxy".[10] That is a complicated way of saying "a galaxy". Used in this sense, there are maybe a trillion such universes in the observable universe. They share the space and may collide. --Lambiam 09:46, 27 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
That sounds like a throwback to when the Milky Way was thought to be "everything". I'm also reminded of a time when I had a short discussion with a fundamentalist Christian who claimed that God was "outside of the universe." I said that the universe, by definition, is everything. So if God exists, then He must be part of the universe. The guy conceded. ←Baseball BugsWhat's up, Doc?carrots→ 21:11, 27 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I agree with that guy. If you accept the notion of an omnipotent God, then He must be able to create stuff that is not a part of Himself. Just because we "define" the Universe to conform with our limited conceptual ability does not alter that. -- Jack of Oz[pleasantries] 21:53, 27 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
God being omnipotent, It is also able to create Itself. --Lambiam 09:17, 28 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Perhaps he conceded too easily. It's a fairly standard theological view that God exists beyond space and time, and while you personally may use "the universe" to mean "everything that exists", I think it's probably more usual to imagine the universe as being restricted to that which exists in spacetime.
That said, and this is of course a digression, the view you report does not strike me as exactly orthodox Christian theology, which usually emphasizes God's dual role as both immanent and transcendent. If you view God as transcendent only and not at all as immanent, then it seems like you might be a deist or something. --Trovatore (talk) 22:01, 27 May 2024 (UTC) [reply]
You seem to be picturing the 'Big Bang' as an explosion of matter/energy into a pre-existing infinite space, which still surrounds the (expanding) 'universe' of matter and energy that we are in (so that there could be other 'Big Bang bubbles' somewhere else in that infinite space): this is a fundamental misunderstanding of current astronomical theories. According to mainstream astronomy, The 'Big Bang' was a (rapid) expansion of space and time themselves, more properly understood as the single entity Spacetime, and of the energy (some of which became matter) within them/it. There is, geometrically, nothing 'outside' Spacetime because there is no outside. This is, of course, hard to visualise and grasp. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.2.67.173 (talk) 21:15, 27 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
As said by Hank Green (and expanded by Elle Cordova) "there was no up, there was no down, there was no side to side". Search youtube for "big bang poem". --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 11:46, 29 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Older people have more distended intestines due to loss of muscle tone. It also means food is pushed along more slowly along the digestive tract. Does this mean that per ounce of ingested food, elderly people will extract more nutrients?
Of course, if this causes them to eat less, it may not mean more calories absorbed. Imagine Reason (talk) 09:24, 29 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I don't know if any of the premises of your argument are correct. But consider this; for about half a billion years our ancestors have had a digestive system. Extracting every usable bit of nutrients from our food has been under strong selection the whole time, because starvation kills and food is limited. Why then would a malfunctioning elderly system do better? Abductive (reasoning) 18:54, 29 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
There is an evolutionary pressure to extract every usable bit of nutrients from our food. There's also an evolutionary pressure to keep the power-to-weight ratio of the digestive system high. Wasting some nutrients to keep the digestive system light may be benificial. I'm not suggesting I disagree with your conclusion. PiusImpavidus (talk) 19:54, 29 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The human digestive system is far from perfect in extracting calories. Imagine Reason (talk) 21:52, 31 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
(The main reason for this question is that in Morgoth's Ring an Elvish name for Neptune is given. Though I suppose they might've been using palantíri as telescopes.) Double sharp (talk) 09:36, 29 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
He does kind of imply at least that the naked-eye limiting magnitude is greater for Elves than for Men. In The Nature of Middle-Earth, "Dark and Light" it is written: The Quendian imagination of the shape of Arda and of the visible Heaven (Menel) above it, was due to the acute minds of a people endowed with sight far keener than the human norm. Though this is for the Round World version, in which the Sun and Moon already exist from the beginning. As for quantitative figures, I guess we're stuck with the data point of Legolas counting 105 horsemen from a distance of 24 km.
Actually, it occurs to me that (perhaps more interestingly than limiting magnitudes), Elves really ought to be able to resolve the Galilean moons of Jupiter. This provides an alternate solution to the longitude problem, at least if you take the Round World versions. :) Double sharp (talk) 15:20, 29 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The Galilean moons would be a cinch for an elf. I had a (human) friend who could do this (he was tested on it several times). Not being particularly interested in astronomy, he only found out in his adult years that this was not usual for most people. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.2.67.173 (talk) 19:42, 29 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Hmm, probably also the crescent of Venus should be resolvable for them. This perhaps has implications on the shapes of the Silmarils. (Although in the Round World Version, Venus already exists beforehand, and its identification with Eärendil is said to be mythologising. From the same essay I quoted: Certain stars (no doubt those we call planets) and among them especially Venus, which they called Elmō (and later mythologically Eärendil), they early observed were “wayward” and altered their places with regard to the “farstars” (fixed stars). These they called companions of the Sun and thought them quite small heavenly bodies – derived from the Sun.) Double sharp (talk) 02:31, 30 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The limiting magnitude can be increased with a sharper view. The sharper the view, the smaller the area of the detector (retina) on which the light falls. The background light is fixed per unit of surface area of the detector, so with the signal on a smaller area, less background competes in this area, increasing signal-to-noise. A sharper view can also help to take a faint object out of the glare of a nearby bright object; relevant to see the Galilean moons.
The other way to increase the limiting magnitude is by increasing sensitivity. No matter how sharp your eyes are, you need a couple of photons before you can see anything. The more photons you detect, the lower the relative Poisson noise. The sensitivity can be increased by (A) a better detector, detecting a larger fraction of the incoming photons; (B) larger aperture, i.e. a bigger pupil; (C) increasing integration time. Many nocturnal animals (and elves may be somewhat nocturnal) have better, more sensitive detectors, although at a price. The tapetum lucidum found in many animals reduces resolution somewhat; some species sacrificed colour vision for better low-light vision. Bigger eyes help to see better, but although Tolkien often writes that Elven eyes are keen and fair, he never writes (AFAIK) that they're big. Maybe elves can at will increase the integration time of their eyes. For humans it's fixed at several centiseconds, but if elves can boost it to a full second (they would largely loose the ability to detect motion), seeing Neptune shouldn't be too hard. Still takes a lot of dedication and patience to find out which of those tens of thousands of faint stars slowly moves, but patience is something you should have if you live forever. Ents might disagree. PiusImpavidus (talk) 20:55, 29 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Why would Ents disagree? They have loads of patience (though it is unclear if they are immortal or just extremely long-lived). Clarityfiend (talk) 22:23, 29 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Ents might disagree with the statement that elves have patience. PiusImpavidus (talk) 11:07, 30 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for the details! I guess I'm personally more inclined now towards explaining the Neptune thing by an Elvish invention of the telescope.
Or maybe the Valar told them where to look, noting that Neptune's magnitude is actually brighter than the most extreme reports of naked-eye viewing of stars. It would be a lot easier to find Neptune if you already know where it is, than to find which of those myriad faint stars is slowly moving. In NoME, Elvish Reincarnation implies that the Eldar were informed about isotopes by the Valar, so this isn't unreasonable in-universe. (Though finding that passage makes me amused by the thought of seeing Galadriel's NMR spectra.) Double sharp (talk) 04:23, 30 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
In canon Men are sometimes mistaken for Elves, so there must not be any gross difference in eye size. —Tamfang (talk) 21:37, 30 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Assuming a comparable physiology, an Elven retina may pack more sensitive photoreceptor cells, while the lens may have better optical qualities. --Lambiam 06:08, 31 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I wouldn't take it for granted that the Solar System outside of Middle Earth is the same as the real one. According to The Silmarillion Earth (or "Arda") was explicitly created by God and smaller deities with their omnipotent powers, and so were the peoples of that world (Elves, Men, Dwarves, and surely Hobbits and Ents, too). And the part that would drive mad the astronomers reading that book, the Sun and the Moon were also created by those beings... ages after the creation of Arda, and after life existed on that world. Cambalachero (talk) 13:00, 31 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Indeed. But Tolkien planned in his later years to make an altered Round World Version in which the Sun and Moon exist from the beginning of Arda. In that case the Two Trees simply preserve their light as it was before they were tainted by Melkor. As I quoted above, these late rewrites imply that the planets in Tolkien's world are the same ones that we have. :) Double sharp (talk) 11:05, 1 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Hmm, curious where you heard about these supposed intended revisions to create a lore more consistent with actual astral bodies. I'm a little skeptical without seeing a source on this, just because it doesn't seem to add up with other well-established details. Bear in mind that every element of the legendarium that bears light on the creation and cosmology of Eä was published after J.R.R. Tolkien's death. Christopher Tolkien finished The Silmarillion by trying to faithfully patch together the content (and fill in gaps himself) using an express desire to have the final work reflect what his father, the original author, would have intended. Nobody would have been in a better position than the younger Tolkien (who made the completion of the legendarium a substantial part of his own life's work and had the fullest access to the existing materials) to know what the elder intended in this respect, and he would have had every opportunity to cause the final work to reflect it, as he did with countless other details. Further, thematically it just doesn't seem to fit: the trees are so fundamental to the cosmonogy of the legendarium, as well as its evolution and eschatology. The trees are part of the more gnostically "pure" version of the world after it was sung into existence out of the higher pleroma by the music of Ainur. The fall of the trees, though instigated by the machinations of Melkor and Ungoliant, are thematically (and arguably psuedo-naturally) the result of an inevitable and unarrestable trend of the world trending away from the direct influence of the Valar and towards a world more defined by physicality and all the ills that come with it. All of this being the result of Melkor's discordant notes, which Eru permitted to remain a part of the song of creation. First the Valar leave Middle Earth and retire to Valinor, and as time wears on, begin making less and less in the way of even indirect influence over it. Next, the Trees are destroyed and the First Age begins. Later the world is reshapped such that Valinor is not even entirely on the same physical plane as the rest of Arda, and reachable only via the Straight Path. The elves diminish and go into the West, returning ultimately to Valinor, the magic and grace of their realms failing and converting them into mundane lands. Meanwhile the light of the trees persists in the silmarils and the phial of Galadriel, bitter sweet echoes of a purer but irretrievable age. Magic fades and Illuvatar's second (and less ethereal) children, humans, inherit the world. You see what I mean? The idea of the world's inclination to a state defined increasingly more by a base, more purely physical state and away from the direct influence of the spiritual animus that gave birth to it is baked into the narrative and the lore, from start to finish. And the trees are the ultimate symbol of the starting point (or at least the start after the music was finished and the Ainur descended into Arda). Besides, the sun and the moon predating the round world just doesn't make much sense: a flat Arda wouldn't be able to rotate on it's access. Mind you, not to imply that there's in way to get the legendarium's cosmology to work with actual astrophyics. Which Tolkien very well knew: all indications are that this was a part of the point. But introducing the sun and the moon before the First Age just makes the discontinuities more obvious and intrusive.All that said, very curious to see where this comes from originally. Certainly there is no shortage of matters that Tolkien went back and forth on over his decades of revisions of the relevant works, nor issues where his son had to make best-guess efforts in choosing among the disparate versions of events. But personally, I tend to doubt that Tolkien seriously considered this particular shake-up. Tonally and in terms of continuity, it just doesn't add up. -sighs a sigh of glutted satisfaction, having sucked out all of the fun the subject matter and wrecked it as surely as a giant spider sucking the magic out a world tree and poisoning it.- SnowRise let's rap 02:51, 3 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
A slightly shorter summary: pre-ROTK, JRRT produced a version of the Ainulindalë with the changes to the cosmology. Melkor seizes part of the Earth to make the Moon for his stronghold, before the Valar cast him out of it and cleanse it. For the time being, it was only an experiment.
But in the late 1950s, JRRT came to believe that the making of the Sun and Moon was too "astronomically absurd" to write in an age when most people believe that the Earth is spherical and is more or less like an island in space. So he came up with a new concept: the "Flat World Versions" are traditions that were handed down by the Númenoreans and then in Arnor and Gondor, that are inescapably blended and confused with Mannish myths. The Elves had their own lore from Valinor that was astronomically and geologically in accord with what we know instead.
JRRT describes the new cosmology across some essays published in the aforementioned collections and in an interview. The Sun and Moon were created together with the Earth, and originally they had the Primeval Light, and what Melkor did instead was corrupt them. Middle-earth was then twilit, because Morgoth darkened the Earth with clouds, such that the stars and moon were invisible and the Sun was only a dim twilight (something like the real Venus without the greenhouse effect, I might add). The significance of the Two Trees is that only there was the Primeval Light preserved, and Varda domed Valinor over to keep Morgoth's corruption out and have it only be lit by the stars. The world was also round from the beginning, but you could not circumnavigate it before the drowning of Númenor because Aman would block the way. The Númenorean Catastrophe removes the inhabitants of Aman from the physical world, though the landmass remains and becomes America after significant geographical upheaval. Thus JRRT writes in these notes Aman and Eressëa would be the memory of the Valar and Elves of the former land.
Crucially, in 1966 The Hobbit was slightly edited in accordance with this new revision: where once read In the Wide World the Wood-elves lingered in the twilight before the raising of the Sun and Moon (completely correct per the Flat World version), there now read In the Wide World the Wood-elves lingered in the twilight of our Sun and Moon. JRRT's late texts published and edited by Christopher in The Peoples of Middle-earth sometimes also imply this: the new description of Fëanor's burning of the ships specifies that it was done "in the night", and that "In the morning the host was mustered", which makes no sense in the old cosmology because the Sun wouldn't yet have first risen; and Thingol's throne room of Menelrond is supposed to be based on the domes of Varda (which don't exist before the changes). The heraldry JRRT drew in the 1960s for the House of Finwë is a "Winged Sun", which also makes more sense in the new cosmology because Finwë otherwise could not have seen a Sun that only rose after he died. So the evidence is clear that the elder Tolkien really seriously intended this change.
As for why it was not adopted by Christopher: Christopher's commentary on these texts indicates that he seems to have thought it a bad idea on the part of his father. I think Christopher made a sensible call, as going on with the intended changes would require much more editorial intervention than leaving things as they were: it does not seem that JRRT ever finished the planned rewrites. But from my perspective as a fan, the whole idea is fascinating and allows the amusing conceit of trying to figure out what was really going on behind the scenes, which is why I asked the initial question about how astronomically plausible the reworking was in one aspect (the visibility of Neptune). Double sharp (talk) 03:45, 3 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
What is the average volume of honey in a bee nest in the wild? I was able to find information on the average volume of a bee nest, but I know that not all of that volume is honey, of course. Thank you! HeyArtemis (talk) 07:49, 30 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Let's say that an object, such as a star, emits a beam of light and it moves across the space. It goes at the speed of light and, unless it reaches an opaque object, it would keep going... for how much time? Forever? Or is there a point when light would simply dimish and disappear? Cambalachero (talk) 19:53, 30 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
No.
It may react with matter, if it encounters any. A flux of many photons will spread out to a larger volume and so the intensity (number of photons passing through an area) will diminish in accord with the inverse square law. But light passing through a vacuum does not 'decay' or have a limit on its range.
BTW, this theory that light can only travel a few thousand miles before 'running out' is part of flat earther canon for some models, as an explanation of how nighttime happens. But then they're flat earthers. Andy Dingley (talk) 20:11, 30 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The idea of tired light used to be somewhat popular but has been entirely discarded by now. --Wrongfilter (talk) 20:22, 30 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'm afraid it is a zombie idea.[11] --Lambiam 05:58, 31 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I guess the apparent reality that things in motion continue in motion forever by default, if unperturbed, seems a bit unnatural when you live in a macroscopic world. Sean.hoyland (talk) 07:32, 31 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Is redshift calculated differently for different spectra?edit
I ask because I came across an article, TXS 1545-234, in the course of regular gnoming. The article claims this radio galaxy to be one of the most distant known objects, but its redshift is only around z = 2.754 (which I take to be measured from radio emissions). It does appear in this source(|date= at least 2006), and I'm wondering whence the claim of such great distance paired with such pedestrian redshift. I'm not able to understand our article Redshift. Also, if anyone has any ideas about how to de-orphan the article linked, please do have at. Folly Mox (talk) 11:31, 31 May 2024 (UTC) edited 11:52, 31 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It is certainly not one of the most distant galaxies known. The author of the article, @Galaxybeing:, should explain why they think it is. --Wrongfilter (talk) 12:12, 31 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
They appear to have made a similar claim at MRC 0406-244 (z = 2.44) although thankfully not at another recent creation, QSO J0100-2708 (z = 3.52). Folly Mox (talk) 12:57, 31 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The redshift, a dimensionless quantity, is the same for the whole spectrum emitted by an object. Compared to TXS 1545-234, JADES-GS-z13-0 is thought to be more than three times as far away from us. --Lambiam 12:37, 31 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks both for your answers, and confirming my suspicion that the claim was merely incorrect. Folly Mox (talk) 13:00, 31 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
A redshift of 2.754 is pretty far away, but stating it's one of the most distant known objects is overstating it a bit. Distances to far-away galaxies are normally expressed in redshift, as redshift is directly observable, in contrast to distance, which depends on a model of the expansion of the universe. But when using redshift as a distance measure, one has to keep in mind that it's highly non-linear. Also, distance is a bit of a strange concept when dealing with these cosmologically distant objects. Are we talking about the distance today, or at the time the light was emitted, or the distance travelled by the light? That last at least has some relevance as it translates to the time that the light has travelled and therefore when it was emitted. JADES-GS-z13-0 may be several times farther away today than TXS 1545-234, but most of that is thanks to the expansion of the universe after the light was emitted. When the universe was young and small (although still infinite), it expanded fast in absolute numbers (percentage per year). In light travel distance, the difference isn't so much.
These objects can be studied to learn more about the early universe. For that, knowing the distance to us is not so important; we want to know about the distance (or time) to the Big Bang. At some point, distances (times) to the Big Bang are known more accurately than distances (times) to us. In any case, the redshift tells us immediately that the universe expanded by a factor of five between the times when the light of JADES-GS-z13-0 was emitted and when the light of TXS 1545-234 was emitted. That puts JADES-GS-z13-0 a lot closer to the Big Bang, although only a small fraction farther from us. PiusImpavidus (talk) 11:05, 1 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
On a tangent but an amusing use (abuse?) of "red shift": chemists use red shift generically to mean "moves to lower energy". Even in the IR part of the spectrum, the term red shift would be used to describe the shift of a band to lower E, say 2000 to 1950 cm-1. This language is of course strange because, formally speaking, a shift toward red for an IR band would mean a shift to higher E. Just sayin'.--Smokefoot (talk) 17:11, 1 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Radioastronomers apply the same "abusive" terminology. We see this linguistic phenomenon also in uses of the verb "to dial", as in the advise to "dial 9-1-1 for any emergency" given to users of smartphones with touch screens. (Using the original rotary sense of the verb in connection with the casual parlance of "butt dial" results in the unfortunate mental image of Giuliani twerking.) Other examples are referring to cotton bed sheets as "linens", or (in the US) to stainless-steel knives, forks and spoons as "silverware", and the computer-graphics terminology calling a screen region a "canvas". I think there is a learned term for this phenomenon if the sense of a word getting abstracted from the physical embodiment after which it was originally named. --Lambiam 05:29, 2 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
JADES-GS-z13-0
Astronomers talk about redshift if it goes to longer wavelengths, in radio, IR, UV etc., and about blueshift if it goes to shorter wavelengths, in radio, IR, UV etc. Things can also redshift past red. See how red that distant object in this picture is? It's a feature coming from UV, shifted to IR. The Lyman-alpha absorption line is at 121.6 nm, here broadened into a Gunn–Peterson trough, redshifted to 1.6 μm, between the F150W and F200W filters of the camera in JWST. It's how they make a first estimate of the redshift, based on broadband images. A precise number follows later from spectroscopy, but takes far more observing time, so this is only done for the most promising targets. PiusImpavidus (talk) 10:18, 2 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
A shop sign is made of a panel that protrudes slightly from the wall on which it is hung, forming an angle of 5° with it. It is 0.74 m tall and has a mass of 8.9 kg. The upper side of the panel is attached to the wall by two cables, one from the right side and one from the left side. Find the tension of the 2 cables 78.211.54.11 (talk) 19:40, 31 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Original in Italian, now edited by IP to English.Translates as: "A shop sign consists of a panel that protrudes slightly from the wall on which it hangs, forming an angle of 5° with it. It is 0.74 m high and has a mass of 8.9 kg. The upper end is attached to the wall by two cables, one on the right side and one on the left side. Find the tension in the 2 cables."
IP editor: as it says at the top of this page, we don't answer homework questions and what we do answer should preferably be asked in English. Mike Turnbull (talk) 19:46, 31 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Doesn't the tension depend on the angle the cables (idealized as straight line segments) make with the panel? --Lambiam 02:53, 1 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Correct. The answer to the question as asked is a curve of tension vs cable length or vertical location. Greglocock (talk) 22:56, 1 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
In my interpretation of the problem – which is not necessarily the intended one – the lower edge of the panel is attached to the wall and the panel can rotate along that edge, like in the "or is it like this?" diagram, which has an exaggerated thickness for the panel. Unlike that diagram, the panel does not stick out at a 90° angle but is standing almost upright. Also, the cables are attached to the upper edge. So it is more like the situation here to the right, but instead of a bottom 60° angle we have a 5° angle. Not enough info has been given to determine the other angles. --Lambiam 04:45, 2 June 2024 (UTC)[reply] P.S. Another way to frame the problem could have been in terms of a drawbridge. --Lambiam 04:53, 2 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
If human embryons of both sexes start off from a female blueprint and given that females lack the male Y chromosome, how it came that women also produce androgens (even if in small quantity), with related limb and facial hair? 212.180.235.46 (talk) 19:59, 2 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Biological systems weren't built by any sort of logical designer. They in no way resemble a computer program, a computer, or, for that matter, anything else in the universe. In the case of androgens, the article mentions that androgens are the precursors to estrogens. Males need estrogens too, btw. All these are steroids, which are fundamental to life and are derived from cholesterol. Abductive (reasoning) 23:18, 2 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Hi. Angles such as 30, 45, 60 degrees are commonly used. I am currently using a very inefficient and convoluted process to find similar angles:
1. Draw a right triangle with height 4.0000 and the top angle as 39.0000 degrees. The bottom is then 3.23914.
2. Open up an excel sheet and populate the first column with values from 38.00 to 40.00 in 0.01 degree increments.
3. In the second column input the equation =tan(RADIANS(A1))*4.0000
4. Manually look through the second column to find a "nice" value (using human heuristics), which is 3.25999604
5. Calculate ROUND(3.25999604, 3)/4, which is 0.815
6. Now go back to the original right triangle, and change the angle to =ATN(0.815)
7. The right triangle now has height 4.0000 and the top angle as 39.1800 degrees, and bottom 3.2600
Is there a way to calculate all such "nice" angles in advance in the form of a table? If that were possible, there would be a row with the values: "tan(RADIANS(39.18)) = 0.815". So in step one, I would input height 4.0000, look in the table for an angle close to 39.0000, which is 39.1800, then input =ATN(0.815) as the angle. In that case, I would not need to open Excel and perform steps 2 to 6.
I am not a programmer but I imagine that it should be possible to write a short script to generate all such "nice" angles from 0 to 360 degrees.
Thank you and have a nice day. OptoFidelty (talk) 21:02, 22 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
One way to approach it would be to graph the function. So e.g. draw a graph of y = 4 tan(x) in a graph package. Excel e.g. though I've not used it for years so don't know how good its graph drawing is now.
Your "nice" angles then can be found when the graph crosses through, or close to, points on your "graph paper", marked to the degree of precision you desire. You might then be able to find these points programatically, or visually, or a combination of both from the graph. --2A04:4A43:90AF:FC35:6CCB:C14C:3818:FDA2 (talk) 23:30, 22 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Does the algebraic (roots) notation exist for the trigonometric values of all angles with integer degrees? 61.224.168.169 (talk) 11:44, 24 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
By the Gauss–Wantzel theorem, the angles of integral degree with algebraic trigonometric values are precisely those that are a multiple of 3°. --Lambiam 04:39, 25 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It is not quite clear to me from this one example what makes an angle "nice". Suppose I draw a right triangle with height 7.5 and top angle 52°. I get 9.59956... for the width. This is close to 9.6. Is it close enough for 52° to be nice?
Is the following nice: height = 7.9735, angle = 9.0941°, width = 1.2763? If not, why not? --Lambiam 21:02, 23 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Lambiam The triangle I ended drawing has height 4, top angle 39.1800 degrees, and bottom 3.2599960396627881356849171185262635206102761449606762736889760643... long.
On a schematic with a 2 decimal point formatting, the rounded numbers would be height 4.00, top angle 39.18 degrees, and bottom 3.26. In that case, the height and angle are exact, and the bottom number is 0.000121482% off from the exact value.
With height = 7.9735, angle = 9.0941°, width = 1.2763, the 2 digit rounded values would be 7.97, 9.09, 1.28. And the rounding error would be slightly larger than my example.
"niceness" is entirely subjective and varies from person to person, and from context to context. In this case, it's basically a personal shorthand word I use to describe "when you round the number to X number of decimal points, the rounded number is less than Y% off from the exact measurement".
The value of X is determined by the exact drafting standard that I am told to draft in. It commonly varies from 1 to 3. the value of Y is, again, subjective. I personally like to keep it "small", but there is no objective measure on how "small" Y needs to be. OptoFidelty (talk) 21:23, 24 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The values of X and Y need to be fixed if you want to construct a table. The range of heights considered also needs to be made finite. Then it is a somewhat trivial exercise to code an algorithm that enumerates all possibilities and outputs the nice ones. --Lambiam 04:51, 25 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you. Does the value of Y need to be fixed or can it be estimated from the desired number of table rows?
For example, if X = 2 and the desired table size is 1000, can Y be estimated from that?
Or maybe when given the desired table size, let's say 1000, it's easier just to loop through all possible angles values (360 * 10^X), then just keep the "best" 1000 values then it's done. Y isn't actually needed in that case. OptoFidelty (talk) 13:11, 25 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The notion of "desired table size" is a new element. You can do either – keep all that are nice, or keep the best N, whether nice or not. You can also keep the best N but discard any that are not nice. Which works best for you depends on what you use these tables for. --Lambiam 18:05, 25 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Does the differential equation x2 * d2x/dt2 = k have a name? (All I've figured out about this so far is that I don't remember enough about differential equations. I'm not getting anything on solving it except errors.) Thank you. RJFJR (talk) 02:45, 23 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
As to a solution, you could guess that one might be some power of and accordingly substitute (where and are constants), then solve for and then solve for . catslash (talk) 09:02, 23 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Then, since nothing in the equation depends on the absolute value of , you could apply an arbitrary time-shift to get a slightly more general solution . catslash (talk) 09:20, 23 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
You're right. Thank you. p=2/3, I was not expecting that. I appreciate it. RJFJR (talk) 14:14, 23 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
This is an autonomous second order equation. If you write and multiply with , you find so for some constant . Solve for and you get a separable first order equation. —Kusma (talk) 14:35, 23 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you. I need to dig out the old textbook and start reading. RJFJR (talk) 19:25, 23 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
catslash's solution is a one-parameter family (indexed by ) of very nice solutions, but in general you should be able to solve the initial value problem for any initial values of and , so you'll get a two parameter family. It is easy to show that the solution exists; you can get an implicit formula from Mathematica or other symbolic computation software. —Kusma (talk) 12:17, 24 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Our article does not mention a sum, but an infinite regression of tasks. Each task has a subtask that must be completed before the whole task can be completed. This is (in Zeno's analysis) as impossible as the task of enumerating all unit fractions in order of magnitude, so that 1/1000 has to come before 1/999 – you can't even start. --Lambiam 15:44, 28 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
To be more precise, the section Dichotomy paradox does not mention this sum. Elsewhere, in the introductory paragraph of the section Paradoxes, it is stated that Zeno's paradoxes are often presented as an issue with the sum of an infinite series, although none of the original ancient sources has Zeno discussing the sum of an infinite series. In my opinion it can be given a place in the analysis of the Achilles and the Tortoise paradox, but not so for Zeno's dichotomy paradox. --Lambiam 20:08, 28 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
What is 'lakh' and 'crore'? How can I understand Indian articles with strings such as 1,00,00, 1,50,00 and so on ?edit
sirs
i really don't understand this lakh and crore business which has lately become very common on the internet apparently it is some kind of indian custom, indian reckoning
please tell me how can you place the comma after two digits only (counting from the front)
firstly how can you go beyond lakh and crore how can i reckon a number with eight digits
1,00,00,00 ??? one hundred lakh and how many crore ? if a crore is one tenth of a lakh, hold on, one lakh is just a hundred thousand ? so how much is a crode please?? if this 1,00,00 is a lakh entire
sirs please forgive my discursiveness i was trying to read up each and everything on this subject and i could not put my head around it kindly direct me to any pertinent source where i can understand lakh, crore, indian customary numbers
2601:481:80:6E60:6C4B:56AE:F2AB:2844 (talk) 23:55, 29 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
We have articles on Lakh and Crore. Do they answer your question? They seem to be a feature of the Indian counting system, and not common in other countries. --RDBury (talk) 00:27, 30 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I think I have studied very well and I am understanding it now.surely this will improve my scores in JEE.the invigilators and examiners will be very pleased with my fast reckoning. thank you sirs 2601:481:80:6E60:6846:DCBF:5125:F19D (talk) 05:18, 31 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
If you see commas in unexpected places, the easiest is to ignore them. 12,34,567 is the same number as 1234567. --Lambiam 06:20, 30 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Kindly don't be writing just any x y z, how can it be same amount if the crode and lakh is arranged in a different manner, since a crode and lakh have values each of their own, they cannot be mingled around or preponed 2601:481:80:6E60:6846:DCBF:5125:F19D (talk) 05:17, 31 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
They are interconvertible values. One crore is equal to 100 lakh, and also equal to 10 million. So 3.5 crore + 7 lakh = 35000000 + 700000 = 35700000, which you can also write as 3,57,00,000 or as 35,700,000 or as 35 700 000. --Lambiam 09:27, 31 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The proposition "if is rational then is algebraic" is comprehensively true,
and is equivalent to "if is inalgebraic then is irrational" (contrapositive).
My question is this:
The proofs for the transcendence of are of course by contradiction.
Now, do you think it is possible to prove somehow the proposition "if is algebraic then is rational", reaching a contradiction?
Meaning, by assuming is algebraic and using some of its properties, can we conclude that it must be algebraic of degree 1 (rational) – contradicting its irrationality?
I know the proposition "if is algebraic then is rational" is not comprehensively true ( is a counterexample),
but I am basically asking if there exist special cases such that it does hold for them. יהודה שמחה ולדמן (talk) 18:48, 30 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
There are real-valued expressions such that the statement "if is algebraic, is rational" is provable, but this does not by itself establish transcendence. For example, substitute for Given the irrationality of proving the implication for would give yet another proof of the transcendence of . I see no plausible approach to proving this implication without proving transcendence on the way, but I also see no a priori reason why such a proof could not exist. --Lambiam 19:24, 30 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Also, for a while now I am looking to prove the transcendence of by trying to generalize Bourbaki's/Niven's proof that π is irrational for the th-degree polynomial:
Unfortunately, I failed to show that is a non-zero integer (aiming for a contradiction).
Am I even on the right track, or is my plan simply doomed to fail and I am wasting my time?
I suppose that you mean to define where the are integers, and hope to derive a contradiction from the assumption For that, doesnt'it suffice to show that the value of the integral is non-zero?
I'm afraid I'm not the right person to judge whether this approach offers a glimmer of hope. --Lambiam 15:40, 2 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
As far as I know there is no standardized symbol for this. I don't think that the notation is common either. --Lambiam 20:18, 31 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Of course and are valid (though here written with e and e' instead of a and b), but β is not given its own integral identity, even though . 2601:19C:4A01:3561:4C27:AD22:B7E2:D04A (talk) 03:23, 1 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Writing for the meridional radius of curvature, a variable that depends on (or, equivalently, on ), we have:
This is the tangential speed of a particle moving along the meridian when in which case the rhs equals --Lambiam 17:30, 1 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Okay, so you are saying is the variable for tangential speed (let's call it "S") and using the chain rule: M(φ) = S(β(φ))β'(φ) and S(β) = M(φ(β))φ'(β), therefore M(φ)dφ = S(β)dβ.
But: and , while and , so S is a radius, not speed (I know, speed here is a calculus thing, not literally "speed", but still) and I should point out S(90-β) = R(β), geocentric radius! --2601:19C:4A01:650:19F3:4CE1:97CE:10D5 (talk) 19:09, 1 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Antiprism talks about higher dimensions, but only in the context of four dimensional Antiprisms created from a Polyhedron and its Polar dual. Is there any reason not to extend this to, for example, being able to make an n+1 dimensional Antiprism out of the n dimensional cube and the n dimensional orthoplex or the 24-cell with itself? Also would the 24-cell anti-prism defined this way be a uniform 5-polytope or is the fact that all but two of the 4-dimensional facets are octohedral pyramids make it non-uniform?Naraht (talk) 19:51, 1 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
That section also mentions five-dimensional antiprisms:
"However, there exist four-dimensional polyhedra that cannot be combined with their duals to form five-dimensional antiprisms.[8]"
Apparently, the generalization to higher dimensions is not straightforward. --Lambiam 04:07, 2 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
To me it looks like Hugh Dalton in the middle and Ernest Bevin on the right, though it's hard to positively identify Bevin since he's looking away. Maybe it's Herbert Morrison. I'm unsure about the woman. --Antiquary (talk) 08:40, 23 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I think it might be Ellen Wilkinson. As it happens, she was my Mother's Godmother, but she died almost ten years before I was born, so I have no direct memories to draw on. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.2.67.173 (talk) 23:49, 23 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Palito Ortega is a popular singer and comedy actor from Argentina. He was elected governor of the Tucuman Province in 1991. He ran for vicepresident under Eduardo Duhalde in 1999, but lost. Cambalachero (talk) 19:01, 23 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
My favorite campaign promise from a joke party (I think 1970s era Monster Raving Loonie… but that could be wrong): “Proposed: to better integrate into the European Common Market the UK will switch from left side of the road driving to right side of the road driving… however, to minimize disruption this will be implemented using a “phased in” approach - starting with heavy cargo vehicles.”
Took me a few seconds to see the joke. Blueboar (talk) 21:45, 23 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I think there were a lot of jokes about the Swedish driving direction transition in the 1960s (Dagen H) being introduced "gradually", so probably not original. Apparently Screaming Lord Sutch once campaigned on introducing pet passports, an idea which was later implemented. AnonMoos (talk) 17:51, 25 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Porn star Mary Carey (actress) ran for governor of California in 2003 on a campaign platform of "taxing breast implants, making lap dances tax-deductible, and creating a 'Porn for Pistols' exchange program. She came in #10 in a field of 135 candidates. Weightlifter and action movie hero Arnold Schwarzenegger became governor. Cullen328 (talk) 18:17, 24 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
One well-known joke actually became President of the USA for a while. History may even repeat itself. -- Jack of Oz[pleasantries] 21:44, 24 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Twice-told jokes rarely work (and that guy hardly worked at all). Clarityfiend (talk) 23:36, 24 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Now, now… Millard Filmore wasn’t THAT bad as President! Blueboar (talk) 11:39, 29 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Watch meme videos of him he seems like a satirical candidate but maybe is just awkward, naive, comedy-using, single-issue and weird but serious (it is too damn high but forced rent cuts in a state with c.4 million non-working adults under age 67 (some of whom live off interest, sugar daddies etc) won't make 3-6 million new jobs) Rent Is Too Damn High Party. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 00:56, 27 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
From our Frivolous parties article: Some more serious political parties, such as the Rent Is Too Damn High Party, may use the same tactics and humorous approaches to politics as their more frivolous counterparts but aim to address legitimate sociopolitical issues, something that some frivolous parties do not do.Alansplodge (talk) 10:42, 29 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
How easy is it to get on the ballot in Britain? The ballot doesn't have that many choices in New York City. Like more than a few but not by much. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 23:26, 29 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
According to the UK government website you need a £500 deposit. Other qualifications/disqualifications are listed there too. See also the Electoral Commission guidance
(According to my memory, the deposit will be returned if you gain more than 5% of the votes cast in your constituency. Also, I thought you needed 20 signatures of voters in your constituency, but I can't find confirmation of those in the online documentation.) -- Verbarson talkedits 10:37, 30 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
So, not a particularly expensive hobby, if you've got ten mates who are in on the joke. I once was Poll Clerk at a polling station for a Parliamentary bye-election where a 'Miss Whiplash' (possibly Lindi St Clair?) featured on the ballot paper, but she never dropped by... -- Verbarson talkedits 14:48, 30 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
In Germany, there is "Die Partei" ("The Party"). For a while, their member in the European Parliament always alternated between voting 'yes' and 'no', no matter what was being voted on. --Morinox (talk) 14:44, 31 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Hi Padates, I'm not at all knowledgeable on this subject, but I found some information you mind find helpful. I found an honors thesis from last year that is focused on Iran's involvement in Syria specifically. From the abstract: "When the Syrian civil war broke out in 2011, Iran quickly aided its long-standing ally, Syrian President Bashir al-Assad. Iran's support of the Assad regime is a significant reason why the war has continued for so long and why Assad is still in power today." I think this thesis may answer your question, or at least give you a lead to finding an answer. Rachel Helps (BYU) (talk) 20:01, 30 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Why was Chad not suspended from the African Union as the only country from the Coup Belt?edit
Literally ALL other countries were suspended
Coup Belt countries (from the page Coup Belt, but reordered for consistency with African Union page quote below)..
Mali was suspended from the African Union [for the second time] on 1 June 2021, following its second military coup within nine months. Guinea's membership was also suspended by the African Union on 10 September 2021, after a military coup deposed the country's President Alpha Condé. Sudan's membership was suspended by the African Union on 27 October 2021, after a military coup deposed the civilian government led by Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok. Burkina Faso's membership was suspended by the African Union in the aftermath of a military coup on 31 January 2022. Niger's membership was suspended by the African Union on 22 August 2023 following a military coup in late July that deposed democratically elected president Mohamed Bazoum [...] Gabon's membership was suspended by the African Union on 31 August 2023 following a military coup that deposed president Ali Bongo Ondimba.
I believe there is some question about whether the succession of Idriss Deby by his son following his death in 2021 constitutes a coup according to the AU's definition. It is more like a succession that is not in conformity with constitutional texts, which is not the same thing as the military deposing a recognized Head of State. Xuxl (talk) 14:32, 24 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Could someone please verify if the Uzbekistan flag (1428-1471) is a hoax. And obviously remove it if the answer is Yes --Trade (talk) 15:13, 24 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Er, that's not there, and the last edit was 2 days ago, so where are you seeing this? --Golbez (talk) 16:07, 24 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I was meaning to link to the Commons page, not the ENWP article.--Trade (talk) 17:58, 24 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
According to the file description: This image represents a fictional flag designed to symbolize the Uzbek Khanate (existed between 1428 and 1471 in Central Asia), drawing inspiration from the historical flags and emblems of previous khanates that existed in the region native to Uzbek people. The design incorporates elements and shapes similar to of the Golden Horde and the Timurid Empire [...] --136.54.106.120 (talk) 18:49, 24 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
If the description is right, the author says he made it up. Not exactly a hoax, more like "original research", as a placeholder. Better he should just have posted a blank rectangle as a placeholder. But maybe you should discuss this on Commons rather than here. ←Baseball BugsWhat's up, Doc?carrots→ 18:54, 24 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I wonder how many others are "fictional flags". -- 136.54.106.120 (talk) 19:04, 24 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
There's a candidate or two here Temerarius (talk) 00:37, 25 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The "sugar-loaf" hat, the kind you don't mean, is a perfume cone. [14] See Head cone.
The deshret crown is bowl-shaped (ignore the main image, look at the gallery at the foot of the page). I note that one of your images has somebody with a scarab beetle apparently on their head: this is presumably a sign about who the figure represents (it's Ra, who rolled the sun across the sky like a beetle rolls a ball of dung), not an actual hat, so the same may be true of whatever vessel-like hat you've seen. More background information needed. Card Zero (talk) 07:41, 25 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Wow, that's really cool that they figured that out recently. The deshret can resemble what I'm thinking of, but deshret is a (some say) reed crown not an earthenware object. Temerarius (talk) 16:05, 25 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Nut (goddess) is depicted with a water jar on her head, but typically round. It would help if you reveal why you think the object is earthenware, and is a vessel, and why it might be on the head of a goddess. Card Zero (talk) 17:23, 25 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It's just one of those times when I didn't write something down. Maybe I confused a goddess with Hermanubis, (see File:Hermanubis.jpg) with figure 2 from Kuntillet Ajruid, with that minor goddess who has reeds on her head; along with the yellow color she looks like Bart Simpson. I think Serapis gets a vessel on his head too sometimes? By the way: to the person who helped me with the arm-shaped pipe-looking censer last time: it is hieroglyph R42 and variations. Temerarius (talk) 18:54, 25 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Nut's vessel is W24 nw, which can sound like her name. Temerarius (talk) 18:57, 25 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
What is the history of the pentagram and quincunx diagrams often used to represent the Chinese five phases? I raised a question about this here, and would be grateful if anyone could point me towards relevant sources. Albie's relation of misfortune (talk) 14:33, 25 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
These diagrams are a visual representation of a graph whose vertices correspond to the phases and the edges to relations between two phases. Naturally, artists designing a visual representation will prefer symmetry, especially if it reflects a conceptual symmetry. If the phases are seen as of equal importance, the only way to reflect that visually in a planar representation is by placing them as the five vertices of a regular pentagon, in which the order of one if the cycles, for example 木→火→土→金→水→木, may be preferred. This gives five pairs of phases, with each pair connected by an edge. If the relations between all pairs are represented in the diagram, resulting in the complete graph on five vertices, the other five edges form a pentagram.
Some representations assign a central position to 土, and give only the relations between the central phase and the other four phases. Then the graph is the star graph with four leaves, which is symmetrically represented by a cross.
I don't know why some texts assign a central role to 土 while others treat the five phases on an equal footing, but producing symmetric visual representations for these symmetric abstractions is probably as old as the oldest diagrammatic representations of the five phases. --Lambiam 12:44, 26 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'm really just looking for evidence of the pentagram presentation of the graph in history. It's also possible to draw a graph over the quincunx. [15] "Graph" itself is a modern western mathematical construction, so I'm curious about whether the Chinese tradition surrounding the wuxing really saw the relationships between the phases in a similar way. Albie's relation of misfortune (talk) 13:44, 26 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Graphs are a tool to think about patterns of relations between items. Sociologists use graphs to model social relationships, but social relationships predate graph theory by millions of years. Diagrammatic depictions that are essentially graph diagrams are not a new phenomenon. One example is the Tree-of-life diagram from the Bahir. Another is the Scutum Fidei. --Lambiam 17:19, 26 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
As a more philosophical point, the pentagram diagram seems to be motivated by the idea that the phases are on "equal footing" as you say, and therefore that the relations between them are interchangable or equivalent, so that the transition from Earth to Metal and from Water to Wood are in some way just reflections of each-other. But in the quincunx diagram, the same transitions look more distinct: an outward motion from the Center to the West, compared to a circular motion from the North to the East. I would be interested to know whether this idea of equivalence shows up in any traditional sources. From the article, I'm not sure whether this is the subject of the debate between translating wuxing as "five elements" and as "five phases." Albie's relation of misfortune (talk) 21:00, 27 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
If you're interested in whether early Chinese theorists used the same verb to denote the change from one of the five phases to an adjacent one, the answer is: sometimes, depending on what their point was. I'm not really sure how to approach your question about equivalence in a more robust way, but sometimes I'm stupid, and this was never really my area of concentration. All this theory had its roots ultimately in the Zhouyi, so the earliest extant sources are commentaries on and quotations of lost commentaries on that text. Folly Mox (talk) 22:14, 27 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Lambiam, assigning a central position to 土 comes from assigning cardinal directions to the five phases, in which "earth" is assigned the direction of "center". I don't remember when any of the major developments in five phase theory took place, although I vaguely remember Liu Xin (scholar) pooularising the newer "generative mode" ordering as a natural explanation for the legitimacy of his sovereign. Folly Mox (talk) 21:41, 27 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
“The five characters on this pentagram correspond to the Chinese traditional five basic elements, or “Wu Xing”, that is, metal, wood, water, fire and earth,” Kong said, adding that it is a musical theory that is unique to China.
I'm not convinced by this: there are many characters around the pentagram, using ancient forms he probably can't read, and they are arranged in five lines, each of which is a text that says something, not an individual character, so where is he getting this from? However, that's his claim. Card Zero (talk) 15:20, 27 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Though not useful to your purpose of finding a traditional image of the wuxing, I'm afraid. I couldn't find one either. Card Zero (talk) 18:25, 27 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It's fine if the words for the five ancient tones correspond with the Five Phases, but the words for the phases / elements themselves are not on that collection of strips (interestingly, the top three lines of characters are written upside down, as if the scribe had rotated the entire roll, or moved to the opposite side of the writing desk).I don't remember enough about early Chinese intellectual history to say when Five Phase correspondence theory was in vogue, but I feel like it probably postdated this manuscript, which is provisionally placed in mid–Warring States, iirc, although since it was tomb-robbed we'll never have a secure date for it. Folly Mox (talk) 19:12, 27 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
This page claims that a Chinese minigun called the "Hua Qing minigun" was introduced in 2009 by Huaqing Machinery Manufacturing Company. However, neither of the two news articles it references calls it a "Hua Qing minigun." They both said that the gun was made by "Jianshe Group" and didn't list any of the specs in the article. Is the entire article just false information? Should it be deleted or something? M-Tails-P (talk) 11:40, 26 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Certainly seems like someone conflated some information. User:MSG17 has prodded the article, which is probably the correct course of action. Good catch, both. Folly Mox (talk) 21:57, 27 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
What about the other language versions of this article? M-Tails-P (talk) 12:01, 1 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Why did much of the Netherlands go Gregorian in 1583.0?edit
Including Holland. I thought they were pretty Protestant and most Protestant zones switched much later (though Holland was relatively religiously tolerant). Did they want to harmonize with Dutchophones in the much stronger Catholic Habsburg empire to the south? Or were they tolerant enough to not mind using a better calendar for secular purposes? When did they switch their movable feast dates to Catholic-style? When was the last major Protestant denomination to do so (including equivalents, I know they sometimes used Computuses that look different from Catholic but gave the same result)? Did anywhere simultaneously use Orthodox Easter and Gregorian calendar for awhile? Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 17:56, 26 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Politics.
Around 1566 the Dutch began their rebellion against Spain. King Phillip II send them an army and had some noblemen who supported the rebels executed, but things got worse. In 1568 the rebels won their first battle, traditionally seen as the start of the 80 years war. Looking for an ally, prince William of Orange, de facto leader of the Netherlands, suggested making Francis, Duke of Anjou, the youngest son of Henry II of France, sovereign of the Netherlands – without giving him too much power. He was a Catholic, but William was very much in favour of tolerant religious policies, and so was Francis. This was arranged in 1580. In 1581, the Dutch formally declared independence from Spain, deposing Phillip II as duke/count/lord of the seven provinces. Francis, following the example of France, wanted the Netherlands to switch to the Gregorian calendar. Zeeland (more Catholic), Holland and the States General (purely political reasons) accepted to keep good relation with their new ally (who, despite being Catholic, hated the Spanish too), the other provinces didn't do so right away. In 1584, Francis died at the age of 29, which was the end of the tight relation with the French. A month later, William was murdered and Dutch policies turned more hard-line. PiusImpavidus (talk) 20:14, 26 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Was the war partly a proxy war between Spain and France? The Pyrenees are a natural border, annoying to fight in, unless the mountains have minerals you can only fight over scraps before you're in the others king's main farmland, the Low Countries are better for land and sea battles. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 00:35, 27 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Hard to say. France had its own wars, with fanatical Catholics supported by Spain and the Pope, fanatical protestants supported by England and the Dutch, whilst the French royals – several kings (brothers) in rapid succession along with their mother, queen dowager Catherine de' Medici – tried to make peace by promoting religious tolerance. France was sandwiched between Spain and the Spanish Netherlands, the Spanish Netherlands were sandwiched between France and the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands, so they all had their strategic interests. The supply routes from Spain to the Spanish Netherlands went either overland, through France, or overseas to Antwerp (passing within gunshot range from the Northern Dutch city of Vlissingen) or Dunkirk (depending on who controlled that city at the time).
Definitely an interesting time, with wars all over the place (often more than two sides), princes getting murdered or taken hostage, royal marriages to make alliances, quickly followed by marriages with the opposing side, religious fanatics burning each other at the stake... PiusImpavidus (talk) 11:00, 27 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The Dutch provinces of Brabant and Zeeland, and the States General adopted [the Gregorian calendar] on 25 December of that year; the provinces forming the Southern Netherlands (modern Belgium) except the Duchy of Brabant adopted it on 1 January 1583; the province of Holland adopted it on 12 January 1583.
@ Adoption in Protestant countries # Rest of the Dutch Republic
The remaining provinces of the Dutch Republic adopted the Gregorian calendar on 12 July 1700 (Gelderland), 12 December 1700 (Overijssel and Utrecht), 12 January 1701 (Friesland and Groningen) and 12 May 1701 (Drenthe). -- Jack of Oz[pleasantries] 00:27, 27 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The Duchy of Brabant was a bit of a special case. Much of it was controlled by Spain. By the end of the war, it was broken up (and it still is). PiusImpavidus (talk) 11:24, 27 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
is it correct to say that Law firm associates are retainers and not employees and that in-house legal counsels are employees? then what is really an external/outside counsel or when are they required? please clarify. Grotesquetruth (talk) 07:19, 28 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
There's nothing much to clarify. Your statements are merely a mix of the state of the matter and the implication of them. You need an external impulse if you either need more objectivity than you're allowing internally or you're trying to lever on forces for any given change of course. You may in the abstract compare with the Baltimore Bridge collapse, although that may be a little bit of a stretch.. --Askedonty (talk) 08:13, 28 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Used in connection with legal services, a "retainer" is the fee a client pays for future legal services. There can be many reasons why someone needs legal counsel. One possible reason is that one has a plan of action but is not certain of the legality of some aspects. Another possible reason is that one is involved in a conflict that may end up in court. If one needs counsel and does not have access to in-house counsel, one needs to obtain external counsel. The in-house counsel of an organization represents the interests of that organization. Someone working for a company may have interests that are not aligned with these company interests. If they need legal counsel, they'd better seek it outside the company. --Lambiam 09:40, 28 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Law firm associates are employees of the law firm. In-house lawyers are employees of the company (or other organization) for which they work. An organization that needs legal services may turn either to its in-house lawyers (if it is large enough to have in-house lawyers) or to a law firm that it hires. There are a variety of reasons why an organization with in-house lawyers might use a law firm instead of, or in addition to, its in-house lawyers. For example, a project might be too big for the in-house lawyers by themselves, or the organization might need more expertise than is available in-house. A law firm typically will staff a matter with a mix of partners (who are not employees) and associates, and perhaps some lawyers with other titles. John M Baker (talk) 12:11, 2 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I was reading an excerpt from The Namesake, a book about a family of Bengali immigrants in the US, and it made me wonder how the bhalo nam vs the dak nam is usually handled when immigrating to the US. In the story, the main character's dak nam is on some of his legal documents, but on the Wikipedia page for Bengali names, it says that the bhalo nam is used on all legal documents. Was this just a decision for the sake of the story, or is this something that might actually happen? Dinsfire24 (talk) 22:56, 28 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Mistakes are made. I have seen my own name, as well as my father's name, recorded incorrectly in official documents. I suppose that in the Wikipedia article the legal documents referred to are Bangladeshi legal documents, which would normally be written in the Bengali alphabet. I'm not familiar with the story of The Namesake. Did the dak nam appear in a Bangladeshi document? Or did someone use the dak nam unofficially in the US and it somehow ended up in a US official document? It is easy to imagine confusion caused by Americans being unaware of the existence of non-US naming customs – and new immigrants being unaware of the general American unawareness of other cultures. --Lambiam 16:46, 29 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Ah, that makes sense. I believe it was on a US official document, so your assessment is likely correct. Dinsfire24 (talk) 17:14, 29 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Is that the one whose main character is named for Nikolai Gogol? (I saw the movie years ago, at a Dravidian friend's suggestion.) —Tamfang (talk) 18:41, 1 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, I think it was. What did you think of the movie? Dinsfire24 (talk) 03:40, 3 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Is there a lawsuit (judged, not settled out-of-court) for all 2,550 possible concatenations of US states and USA? (100 lawsuits named United States v./vs. state or vice versa, 2,450 named state vs state). Have even half of them happened yet? Have all 13x12+26 concatenations of the Original 13 and the US happened yet? Is DC allowed to sue the US or a state or vice versa? Did US courts ever decide a suit between sovereign countries? Has New York City ever sued New York State or vice versa? What would the short form name be if a government sues the same government more than once in a year? Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 05:21, 29 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
According to the U.S. Constitution (Article 3, Section 2), the Supreme court has "original jurisdiction" over certain types of cases "in which a state shall be a party", including "controversies between two or more states". For a speciific case, see New Jersey v. New York. I would be willing to bet a large sum of money that there haven't been 2,450 lawsuits of this type between all theoretical permutations (what reason would Idaho have to sue Florida??), but there has been more than one lawsuit over the years between certain specific pairs of states (see New York v. New Jersey (2023) etc). AnonMoos (talk) 17:46, 29 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The few dozen in the category do seem to be overwhelmingly regional spats like border disputes though there is a Texas v. New Jersey and Texas v. Pennsylvania. Do any pairs sharing a land border not have lawsuits both ways yet? Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 18:30, 29 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Based on reading about this trial, I gather that in NY, falsifying business records for the hell of it (not in furtherance of another crime) is a misdemeanor, but falsifying them in furtherance of another crime (the "object offense") is a felony. Let's assume the NY DOJ doesn't put on gazillion dollar media spectacle trials to pursue people for misdemeanors. They are trying Trump for falsifying records for purposes of breaking election law. The thing is, the election law in question is both a federal law (they can't try him for it in NY state court) and very very complicated. And the election law part of this is not in Trump's NY indictment. I haven't seen the jury instructions so maybe they shed some light on this issue. What I'm wondering is, assuming the NY jury returns a conviction, does that only establish a misdemeanor, with a separate federal trial on the election law vio to bump the NY charge up to a felony? Or are they supposed to say he did it for another crime without having to establish that whatever he was trying to do was actually a crime? I haven't seen any press coverage saying this outright, but there is a fair amount (including from anti-Trump writers) skeptical of the process.
In general, if there is a two-element crime, do you usually have to prove both elements in the same trial, or can you have a separate trial for each element? The first element (falsification) is a criminal charge in its own right, so it's a legitimate (misdemeanor) criminal trial, but the second element (furtherance of another offense) seems to be partly in limbo.
I'm not seeking legal advice, Trump can pay his own lawyers and IANAL. Thanks. (It's also possible that I have this story at least partially wrong, due to unwittingly reading propaganda). 2601:644:8501:AAF0:0:0:0:98EB (talk) 06:48, 29 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not a US lawyer so can't comment on the specifics, but having an offence dependent on the commission of another offence that hasn't been charged, even an offence under the laws of a different jurisdiction, is not unusual. Money laundering offences will often work like this, for instance: you can launder in jurisdiction 1 the proceeds of a crime committed in jurisdiction 2 (e.g. you can commit a fraud in Paris and then launder the proceeds through a bank in London), and you can be tried for the money laundering in jurisdiction 1 regardless of whether there has been or will be a prosecution in jurisdiction 2 for the underlying crime. The point is that even if you can only be tried in a particular jurisdiction for a particular crime, that doesn't stop the prosecuting authorities of another jurisdiction establishing as a fact that you have committed that crime in a prosecution for another crime. I suspect that that is similar to how the particular law works here, as everything I have read says that he is on trial for the felony version of the offence charged in New York. Proteus(Talk) 10:35, 29 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Yes there have been some updates today mentioning the NY election law and the jury instructions. Good point about money laundering and thanks for that info. If Trump is convicted it will be interesting to see how the appeals play out. 2601:644:8501:AAF0:0:0:0:98EB (talk) 20:42, 29 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'm also not a lawyer; but I have followed the CNN cover, and did read the judges instructions (which seemligly by NY law are open to read for the whole world, except for those 12 people (+ their potential replacements) to which the instructions are directed...). The judge very explicitly explained that a "guilty" verdict should be appropriate if and only if the jury finds that "beyond a reasonable doubt" Trump has comitted or knowingly induced others to falsify business records and had done so with the intention to commit or cover (another) crime. Thus, as far as I understand the instructions, if the jury should find Trump guilty of just the falsification (which in itself just would be a misdemenour), but not with the aforementioned intent, then their verdict should be "not guilty". In other words, the prosecution claimed that Trump is guilty of the combined two element crime, and the jury should decide on whether he was guilty as accused, not on whether he in fact is guilty of something else—and just falsifying the records but without the intent to commit or cover a crimee indeed is considered as "something else". (On the other hand, they may be declare him guilty of the combined crime on some of the 34 charges, but not guilty on others.) Was this clear?
The other question IMHO is really interesting; but it partly may be based on a misunderstanding. The prosecution has offered three "theories" for what crimes Trump intended to commit or cover up. As far as I understand, only one of them concerns the federal election law. One of the others concerns breaking the (state) taxation laws in New York. The third concerns other book-keeping crimes. By the judge's instruction, if the jury finds that Trump intended to commit or cover any one of these three offenses, then the second part of the prerequisites for a "guilty" verdict indeed is fulfilled. Now, as far as I followed the CNN summaries, the prosecution indeed stressed the election law offenses they claimed Trump has committed; but the other two possibilities still are available and could be considered in the jury's deliberation. (Still, if they do declare Trump guilty on some or all charges, then I personally suspect that this point may be used as one of the grounds for an appeal. However, since this is just a speculation by a non-lawyer, my suspicion isn't a proper part of an answer to your question.) JoergenB (talk) 21:35, 30 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Trump can pay his own lawyers, but will he? —Tamfang (talk) 23:01, 29 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Flags at presidential inaugurations: the Hawaiian anomalyedit
At US presidential inaugurations, five national flags are hung vertically at the Capitol: a 50-star flag in the center, flanked to either side by the first flag representing the new president's state of residence, flanked on the ends by two 13-star Betsy Ross flags. If the president is from one of the 13 colonies, their "state flag" uses the Hopkinson-style row-and-column arrangement, preventing a clash with the Betsy Ross's star circle. But what happens when the new president is from Hawaii? (And no, Obama doesn't count – he was an Illinoisan for this purpose.) Would there be three identical 50-star flags flanked by two Betsy Rosses? Or would they loop back to using 13-star Hopkinson flags to break things up? Or would they simply use three flags instead of five? Or perhaps Betsy-50-Betsy-50-Betsy, or 50-Betsy-50-Betsy-50? 71.126.56.57 (talk) 12:12, 29 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
You might have to wait and see. Alansplodge (talk) 16:24, 1 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Nye Bevan, mastermind of the NHS said, ‘There was a complete health service in Swindon. All we had to do was expand it to the country.'[16]
Possibly he found it a useful quote to butter up whichever locality he was currently speaking to? -- Verbarson talkedits 12:02, 30 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I guess that would depend on the locality's view of Tredegar. Or if they had ever even heard of it... ? Martinevans123 (talk) 12:12, 30 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
No, I was suggesting he used the quote anywhere, but changed the name to Tredegar/Swindon/wherever he was speaking, to imply that they had inspired the NHS. I believe there were local health schemes at many places around the country, possibly started or assisted by big employers. -- Verbarson talkedits 15:00, 30 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The sources for Swindon are not better than (i.e. just as bad as) those for Tredegar. DuncanHill (talk) 17:55, 30 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Bevan had very specific reasons to refer to Tredegar. [17]AndyTheGrump (talk) 15:06, 30 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
...and that reference indeed contained the (alleged) quote "we will Tredegar-ise you" - but it seemed a bit anecdotical IMHO. JoergenB (talk) 15:30, 31 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Quite, there is nothing that I have been able to find that says when he said it, where, or to whom. I have found a suggestion that it was from a film in the 70s or 80s. DuncanHill (talk) 18:00, 31 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Hello,
What is the name of an argument that is made purely to illustrate a point about a larger situation? For example, if someone were to argue that America is a pluralist (interest-group-centered) democracy, not because they think that it actually is but because they want to call attention to/promote their view of the larger situation, which is the outsize influence of interest groups in America.
JuxtaposedJacob (talk) 22:17, 29 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I call making an argument solely because one thinks it will carry weight with someone, without believing in its factualness or holding the values associated with it, concern trolling, and if it's appealing specifically to some prejudice, demagoguery. OTOH, designating an argument as tentative and provisional because you intend to deboonk it later is called "playing Devil's advocate" and is a valid tactic. Aecho6Ee (talk) 02:02, 30 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Wiktionary has a much more restricted definition of the verb concern troll, being an online activity with a disruptive purpose. --Lambiam 06:58, 30 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Wiktionary as our ally. The notion of a provisional process seems to be hinting at the until now rather undefined "attention-getter" required at the attention step in Monroe's motivated sequence. --Askedonty (talk) 12:50, 30 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
That is a very generic term. Parallelism, for example, is a very common rhetorical device that has nothing to do with the essentially dishonest situation sketched in the question. --Lambiam 15:09, 1 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Sure, I've intentionally been more than a bit imprecise. In my day to day lexicon, I would actually refer to what the OP describes simply as a "rhetorical argument", i.e. that it serves only metatextual ends in the discourse and the literal meaning of the argument itself doesn't matter. Do other people say this? I think I extended it from the common "rhetorical question" idiom but that seems reasonable enough. Remsense诉 15:30, 1 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Your question and example is in error. You've defined elite theory, not a pluralist democracy. If an outsized interest group has major influence, that's what we call an "elite democracy", which is exactly what the US has now. Viriditas (talk) 21:56, 1 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
the term "postmodernism" in non-academic discourseedit
Hi all,
I've been doing some work on the postmodernism article, and I believe that it needs a section on how such a poorly defined term from art criticism made its way into mainstream cultural and political discourse. Can anyone point me to any good sources? Or just suggestions of where/how best to find high-quality sources on this kind of thing?
From the point of view of many people who were somewhat aware of developments in certain corners of U.S. academia, but not directly involved, it was a part of a wave of French-derived theories mainly imported from France starting in the 1970s (see Foucault, Kristeva, Derrida, Lyotard, Lacan, Irigaray, ad nauseam) which had little concern for facts or truth, and in some manifestations had a strong ultra-relativist hostility to the very idea of truth (see strong programme, constructivism, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" etc etc). The general reputation of such "theory" (a word sometimes pronounced with reverence in English literature departments, but with contempt by academics of a more scientific orientation) was not helped when Paul de Man turned out to have Nazi connections. For a relatively early book partly about such "theory", see Higher Superstition. Even people without any great knowledge of postmodernism/deconstructionism have sometimes wondered what the heck the value is of an academic field which hovers on the boundary of rejecting the concept of truth (and sometimes crosses over the boundary). AnonMoos (talk) 00:29, 2 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I've always wondered if there was a deeper, perhaps coincidental connection with Asian philosophical traditions. There are arcane philosophical ideas about rejecting the concept of truth that can be traced to Hindu and Buddhist teachings, particularly when it comes to understanding emptiness. Because these old ideas have religious patinas, they are considered obscure and out of reach for most people. It almost seemed like Derrida and others were giving people a taste of this, very much in line with countercultural interpretations that perceived differences in assumed and given truths, experienced and lived truths, and learned or revealed truth, such as the kind popular in Christianity. So maybe the value is in realizing that Derrida and others, who in all likelihood were atheists and quite secular, had unknowingly crossed over into religion. Just my take. Viriditas (talk) 03:47, 2 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I don't know. My two cents are that postmodernism is a good idea for sciences which do not have a paradigm, and a bad idea for sciences which do. tgeorgescu (talk) 03:59, 2 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Even though my politics are likely very different than AnonMoos, and lean towards the progressively liberal, I tend to agree with conservatives that postmodernism overall was bad for academia. I only say this because I saw the impact it had in the university up close and personal, and I knew then it was nonsense just as I do now. That is not to say that nonsense doesn't have a time and place, which is what you are getting at in some respects with your reply. Personally, I think a certain kind of nonsense makes for some good art, like comedy, or even certain kinds of music such as aleatoric music. And like I said above, it may even have a reduced role in philosophy and religion. But for academia as a whole, it's hard to see how it was useful, since it served more to confuse students than to enlighten them. Viriditas (talk) 04:11, 2 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
This is not really the place to debate the issue at any length, but I actually consider myself somewhat "left" (certainly in terms of whom I'm likely to vote for in U.S. elections), but a fact- and truth-respecting Enlightenment-influenced reasoned leftist, who's unlikely to be swayed by jargon buzzwords or trendy slogans of the moment, if they don't have substance behind them. Some forms of Buddhism analyze the world in terms of "things true", "things false", "things true and false", and "things neither true nor false" (and each of these four can then be negated as a whole), and as a dogmatic religion this may not be any worse than any number of other dogmatic religions, but I don't see how it's likely to advance our understanding of either literature or scientific facts about the universe. It's been pointed out a number of times, that postmodernist/deconstructionist apathy toward truth is overall compatible with global-warming denialism (may have even been part of the foundations of global-warming denialism in some respects), and the only real reason why postmodernists/deconstructionists aren't climate-deniers is pure personal preference... AnonMoos (talk) 05:47, 2 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks, everyone, for the input. My question, however, still stands (which is just to say that I remain confused). What I would like to document for the article is how the thought of a variety of notoriously difficult French thinkers in the second part of the 20th century came to attain such an outsized importance in popular discourse. People who have not even heard of the figures mentioned above believe that science, culture, and society are genuinely threatened by the fringe views held by a small number of professors of the humanities. This seems to me quite unusual and in need of explanation. Patrick (talk) 15:53, 2 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
There are people who whip up a frenzy of righteous indignation on various media about basically anything not fitting the ideal way they wish to see the world framed. What draws their ire can be a library holding a book acknowledging that humans too have bodily functions, or a teacher admitting to their class that the Emancipation Proclamation did not totally erase the problems of formerly enslaved people (or even merely referring to them as "enslaved people"). The idea is that the world is ideal, or rather would be ideal except for a growing legion of social-justice warriors and intellectuals out of touch with reality, controlled by a sinister elite with a nefarious secret plot. They suggest forcefully that if not stopped this will upend everything we hold dear. It gains them a following of easily frightened people and helps to maintain the status quo.
Specifically for postmodernism in academia, because the writings of the stars in the field were so abstruse, it was easy to fake it and not get caught (not only for Sokal), which appeared a more inviting road to upcoming academics in a publish or perish environment than to call out the Emperor's New Clothes of a local star. IMO the criticism of scientific certainty as being a cocky pseudo-certainty is sometimes justified; both sides of the debate can go overboard. See also Science wars. --Lambiam 16:42, 2 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Well, that's not implausible, but Wikipedia can't denounce something as a cynically deployed moral panic without much stronger sourcing than I think we are going to find.
Since most of the major texts and figures are more than 30 years old, I was hoping to find a non-polemical account of how these various thinkers, most of whom did not use the term "postmodern", were lumped together under that heading and injected into the popular imagination. For, as is attested by this very thread, it continues to generate a strong evaluative response well-outside the seminar room.
(Also, NB, Many of the criticisms mentioned here are documented at criticism of postmodernism, which another editor broke off into a child page due to its considerable length.) Patrick (talk) 18:04, 2 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
AnonMoos, I'm familiar with the history of climate denial, and I don't see any direct connection between the architects of science denial and postmodernism, so I wonder if what you are describing is just a coincidence. I do see what you are saying when it comes to people like Jean-François Lyotard and his unusual admonition against explanatory theories and consensus, which he calls an "outmoded and suspect value", as this comes off as deeply anti-science and, to my mind, even anti-democratic, which is odd to me, because he is described as anti-authoritarian. This is one of the many reasons I dislike postmodernism; it is self-contradictory, paradoxical, and has little to no explanatory or predictive value. In some respects, it is a natural outgrowth of the counterculture of the 1960s, but in others, it just devolves into navel-gazing. I was also surprised to discover that there are writers who have drawn parallels between Buddhist notions of emptiness and postmodernism, which I thought was my own idea. It wasn't. As for the OPs question, it's a good one and it's something I still don't know the answer to here. Viriditas (talk) 20:34, 2 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Patrick_Welsh -- In the case of Judith Butler, the largely unfalsifiable "fringe views held by a small number of professors of the humanities" have had a very deep influence on a number of western nations over the past ten or a dozen years, many would say for the worse, leading to unfair competition in girls' and women's sports, biologically male sex offenders being placed into women's prisons, sterilization of children for reasons that the Cass Review found to be usually not based on solid science, etc. etc. Political turmoil over gender ideology controversies almost certainly accelerated the departure from office of the last two First Ministers of Scotland (Humza Yousaf and especially Nicola Sturgeon), though not the only reason, while the Green Parties in the UK (different organizations in England & Wales and in Scotland), have now adopted a rigid Stalinist attitude toward gender ideology, rapidly expelling from the party anyone who dares to question it in any way (they seem to be a lot more concerned about that than about environmental and ecological issues these days). In the United States, roughly two dozen states have passed anti-gender-ideology laws while a smaller number have passed pro-gender-ideology laws, and there's a perpetual flood of lawsuits flying in all directions. I bet a lot of people really wish that Judith Butler was a fringe figure without much influence outside academia, but that's not the case... AnonMoos (talk) 21:26, 2 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I can’t say that I agree with this assessment, as most of it has been debunked as conservative fearmongering; I also don’t see the direct connection between gender issues and postmodernism. I first learned about this topic in the context of anthropology, so I think it’s been politicized by bad actors, many of whom have connections to religious interest groups. For me personally, this has always been an issue related to civil and human rights. Opponents exemplify the maxim: "When you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression." Somehow, I think issues related to postmodernism are being thrown into this mix unnecessarily, often to muddy the waters. Even our article on gender equality starts off in the early 15th century. Further, the fact that traditional gender roles are historically enforced by society doesn't really have anything to do with postmodernism. More interesting is how traditional gender roles, when looked at with a historical microscope, tend to fluctuate greatly over time and culture. My understanding is that this means that traditional gender roles don't actually exist, they are artificially imposed, such as forcing boys to wear dresses as children (quite common until recently) and dressing girls in blue clothing (now pink in the modern era). Pink was once considered more "masculine" than blue, etc. One thing that drove this point home to me the other day was a discussion on NPR where one of the participants said, and I loosely paraphrase, "until recently, our only acceptable career choice as women was to be mothers". It's a heavy statement that has a great deal behind it. Although not in any way equal or equivalent, I think men have faced a similar problem. Until recently, men were shaped as warmongers; they either had to go to war on the battlefield, go to war in the courtroom, go to war in the boardroom, or go to war on the natural world (science). So what women are going through, men are also experiencing in different ways, but obviously from a position of power. This isn't a kind of postmodernism, nor is it saying that there's no objective truth. It's just an observation that societal truth changes over time and place. As for your comment about environmental and ecological issues, I have noticed more people engaging in interdisciplinary discourse in those two fields, and I wonder if this comes off as "postmodern" to critics. About a month ago, I watched an hour long webinar about mitigating climate change in Hawaii, and while it was very good and run by two leading experts on the subject from the University of Hawaii, one from the social sciences and one from the hard sciences, some of the things the social science representative said were a bit fuzzy and postmodern-like, but I think their intention was rooted in the idea of inclusion: climate change will impact everyone in every field, so we need to have a big tent. I could see conservative critics hating on this, but it makes a lot of sense if you consider that nobody is safe and everybody will have to do their part. My guess is that this POV is very much at odds with conservatism, as that kind of ideology is rooted in Us vs. Them polemics, and depends on upholding the status quo, which means continuing to use oil and not to change the way we do things, and to keep society stratified, segmented, and segregated by class, race, gender, etc. This is why I think most criticisms of postmodernism might not be criticisms of postmodernism at all, but rather reactionary attempts to stay the course and prevent progress. Viriditas (talk) 22:00, 2 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks to y'all for your attention to my query! I do not see this going anywhere productive, however, and I am unfollowing. Please tag me or, better yet, post to the discussion page with any suggestions of good sources.
Sorry, I only just now looked at your article. It already uses Connor's The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism which answers your question in spades. It notes that Daniel Bell, Jean Baudrillard, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Charles Jencks, and Ihab Hassan were working on the topic simultaneously in the 1970s and 1980s, but it wasn't until the 80s that that Fredric Jameson synthesized (in part) the disparate work into a cohesive whole, at which point it was anthologized in the 1990s, and became transformed into a kind of pseudo-hypothesis (my words) in the humanities, forming the first notions of what became known as postmodern theory in academia, followed by work by Hans Bertens and John Frow. By the late 1990s, it transformed into a kind of philosophy and became associated with "postcolonialism, multiculturalism and identity politics", which was a newer formulation. Connor notes that in 1970, it focused on postmodernist literature; in 1980, it was postmodern architecture; while by 1990 with the fall of the Soviet Union, it became a discussion of cultural postmodernism. Connor argues that by the 2000s, it had transformed into discussions of legal, religious, and performance postmodernism. There is some indication in the book that Jean Baudrillard may have had a lot to do with introducing the discussion into academia, but he famously distanced himself from postmodernism. Frankly, I find the entire topic confusing and obfuscatory, so this will be my last comment on it. Just looking at Connor's book for ten minutes made me remember why I dislike this subject so much. It's just nonsense. Viriditas (talk) 23:33, 2 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
There's no real commonality between "gender equality" and "gender ideology", except for a word of six letters. Some gender ideology fanatics are among the strictest in insisting on basically traditional gender roles -- if a child (even far younger than puberty) shows any non-traditional gender-role characteristics, then the extremists will insist the child is "trans". (So much for tomboys, etc.) For example, Susie Green's son liked wearing tutus and playing with girls' toys, and his father was uncomfortable with that behavior, so that was apparently pretty much it, from anything that she's ever said publicly -- he was dragged off to Thailand and castrated. Our Susie Green article is mealy-mouthed when it says she "unexpectedly" resigned -- she had received severe criticism from a number of sources, and the organization Mermaids which she dominated for years was placed under a legal inquiry a week after she resigned, and her boasting TED Talk mysteriously disappeared off of Youtube a month or two later, but you won't find any of that out from her Wikipedia article. Also, gay and lesbian advocates never displayed the personal vindictiveness that "transactivists" or "TRAs" do. Gays and lesbians singled out a few prominent figures like Anita Bryant and Rick Santorum, while TRAs try to destroy the careers or lives of a large number of people who dare to dissent from gender ideology, often using thuggish tactics of intimidation and harassment, and often seemingly motivated by misogyny in singling out women for heavier retribution than men. Gays and lesbians also never had any particular objections to heterosexuals meeting together for relevant purposes (such as in singles bars), while TRAs have devoted great effort to making it almost impossible for lesbians to publicly meet together in some regions and countries (see the Tickle v. Giggle lawsuit, whose only amusing feature is its name, etc etc) . Much of lesbian life is now furtive and underground in those areas, while back in the 1990s it was open and free. A great advancement for "progressivism". I'm sure! AnonMoos (talk) 23:40, 2 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Cancel culture and deplatforming were invented by the right wing and are touchstones of conservatism, not the left. It was used for decades to ostracize anarchists, socialists, communists, peace and anti-war advocates, homosexuals, libertines, labor rights advocates, and anyone remotely perceived as a threat to capitalism, the military industrial complex, and the government. This changed in the 1960s and 1970s, as the right wing openly opposed progress such as civil rights and desegregation, aligning and identifying themselves as regressives, and engaging and supporting the criminal Nixon administration which was pardoned for its crimes. This led the right to create their own conservative counterculture, in the spirit of the Powell memo and the Koch network, and wage a campaign of conservative infiltration of the media and academia over about four decades, all the while claiming there was a "liberal media bias" and "liberal bent" to academia; once again showing that every accusation was, in fact, a confession. In response to this open opposition to democracy, obstructionism, and authoritarian impulse, progressives began to fight back. The right wing revised history (as they always do), to make it seem like the left invented cancel culture and deplatforming in the 2000s, when the right had been using those tactics for a century. Once again, the old conservative adage applies: "do as we say, not as we do". Or as I like to say, "watch what they do, not what they say". All this constant talk of "electoral fraud" and "irregularities" on the right, only to discover that it was the right who was trying to overturn the election. This is what conservatism looks like. Rank hypocrisy, disinformation, and lies. Every accusation is a confession. This is post-truth politics, and if it's postmodern, it's an invention of the right, not the left. Viriditas (talk) 00:24, 3 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
What kind of history? Rowena probably didn't exist, but if she did, she did it in the 5th century. Acha of Deira is a good option. Bertha of Kent was slightly older, but Frankish. Card Zero (talk) 08:22, 3 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The NATO phonetic alphabet is prescriptive, not descriptiveedit
Can anyone tell me exactly what this means?? I'm used to these adjectives as dictionary descriptions. Prescriptive dictionaries tell only the definitions of words perceived as proper; descriptive dictionaries tell all the definitions of words people actually use. (In my experience, most dictionaries fall in between these 2 descriptions.) But how do these terms describe the NATO phonetic alphabet?? Georgia guy (talk) 16:33, 21 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
That phrase doesn't appear in our article, so there's no way for me to take context into account, but it seems pretty straightforward: the codes used are prescribed (i.e. you have to use the ones provided or you are using them incorrectly) and not described (i.e. the set you see was not built up of what users were already found to be using and you may choose to follow or not follow it). Sorry, maybe I'm misunderstanding your question. Matt Deres (talk) 17:27, 21 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Perhaps (I'm guessing) someone wanted to contrast the sense of phonetic alphabet as used in the name "International Phonetic Alphabet" with that used in "NATO phonetic alphabet". Someone familiar with both, not knowing how the name Slough is pronounced, will be helped by the IPA transcription /slaʊ/. To them, this transcription describes the pronunciation. The NATO phonetic alphabet is not informative in this respect; it does not describe pronunciations. If that is indeed what is meant, it represents a limited viewpoint. We can help someone desiring to know how to write the name of this little town by spelling it out as Sierra Lima Oscar Uniform Golf Hotel. The NATO phonetic alphabet describes spellings. IPA transcriptions are not informative in this respect.
Neither alphabet is prescriptive in the usual sense of that term. Some organizations prescribe the use of the NATO spelling alphabet for spelling purposes. --Lambiam 06:52, 22 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
In other words, "NATO phonetic alphabet" is simply a misnomer. "NATO spelling alphabet" would be a more accurate name. — Kpalion(talk) 14:55, 22 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Even more accurate: "ICAO spelling alphabet". --Lambiam 06:19, 25 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Another: "washerwoman's beetle" (type of mallet to assist in handwashing clothing). And ploughman's lunch. — Arlo James Barnes 21:55, 28 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Words such as user and union begin with vowel letter but with consonant sound. Are words like year and yellow also such words? Does English consider letter Y to be vowel?--40bus (talk) 20:09, 21 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
English considers y in year and yellow to be a consonant, in rye, city it is a vowel, see Y#Vowel. TSventon (talk) 20:28, 21 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
And yet the sound of it is a semivowel, as is w. Even so, "a year" is easy to say, whereas saying "a hour" involves a slight glottal stop, a habit to which most of us are not accustomed. Actually I take that back, Glottal_stop#Before_initial_vowels says that we are accustomed to it, maybe that's why I'm calling the effect "slight". Card Zero (talk) 12:22, 25 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
This has nothing to do with the English article, despite your title.
Kids are typically taught about vowels as being letters, and nothing else. And that there are exactly 5 of them (A,E,I,O,U), and no more. And that every word has at least one of them. That mash of misinformation gets them so far, but then trouble strikes when they consider words like my, fly, shy, hmm, shhh etc. Where's the missing vowel?, they cry. Then they're told that the Y substitutes as a vowel, but it's really not a vowel at all. And that hmm and shhh are not even words to begin with, just sounds we make - except they appear in dictionaries, so ... let's just pretend that's not so. Again with the misinformation.
What they should be told is that vowels are sounds first and foremost, and that we have created a wide array of letters and letter combinations to represent those sounds. Most of the sounds can be represented using the iconic 5 letters we're taught as children, but there are some cases where extra help is required. Such as pity, my, fly, cry etc. Pity has 2 vowel sounds, which we represent using a I and a Y. In this case, Y is a vowel letter, exactly like A or I or O. In year and yellow, Y is a consonant letter, as it is in most other cases. So Y has a dual role. Even W is sometimes a vowel letter, as in cwm (borrowed from Welsh but now accepted as a Scrabbleworthy English word).
I'm sure a case could be made for some other consonant letters to be considered vowel letters in some circumstances. Take hi - that's pretty straightforward. But what about high? Is it that the vowel is I, and the G and H are just silent letters? Or is it that the entire set of IGH is a vowel letter-combination? Or is it that each of I, G and H are vowel letters? Hmm. -- Jack of Oz[pleasantries] 22:27, 21 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
JackofOz -- It does have to do with the indefinite article (the distribution of the forms "a" and "an")... AnonMoos (talk) 03:30, 22 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I am so bored to see "a year", "a unit", "a European", "an hour", "an MRI", "an S" etc., since "an year", "an unit", "an European", "a hour", "a MRI", "a S" etc. would be better as the first three begin with a vowel letter and the last three with a consonant letter. In Hungarian, definite articles a and az are determined similarly to a and an, but there are no words in Hungarian that begin with vowel letter but consonant sound. It would be better if English articles were determined by grammatical gender rather than this. --40bus (talk) 05:32, 22 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Unit and European are examples of words that begin with a vowel letter but a consonant sound. Whether something is considered a vowel for a/an purposes depends, as I stated above, on the sound, not the spelling. The initial sounds in year, unit, and European, are consonant sounds (y), hence they take a, not an. The initial sounds in hour, MRI and S are vowel sounds (the h is silent in hour, and the initialisms are spoken letter by letter (em-, es-). Hence they take an, not a. Comparing this feature of English with Hungarian or any other language would seem to be somewhat unproductive, imo. -- Jack of Oz[pleasantries] 07:31, 22 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I am truly sorry to hear that the particular features of the English language, having occurred through centuries of evolution, would bore you. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 09:30, 22 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Wakuran, I truly share this feeling with you. –Austronesier (talk) 18:38, 22 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I am more than sorry, I am pissed off. 40bus has a habit of asking about why certain languages (most often English) do things and speaking about how they wish that it was done some other way (often saying that it "should" be done another way). It is rude and arrogant. If 40bus has such a dismissive opinion of English, they are welcome to stop using it. --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 10:37, 23 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
40bus -- I am of course distressed to learn of your emotionally fatigued state, but "year" has always begun with a consonant sound in the English language, and "hour" with a vowel sound. It's only the spellings which might indicate otherwise -- and in fact, in practical terms, the spelling of "year" is NOT very ambiguous, since "y" is almost always a vowel letter only in Greek words and word-finally (and in a very few other cases, such as to distinguish "dyed" from "died", or also as the second element of visual diphthongs, if you want to count that). "Year" doesn't look much like a borrowing from Greek, and the "y" is not at the end of the word, so that the "y" letter is unambiguously consonantal there. And when there was a diphthong sonority shift from [iw] to [ju] in early modern English, this did not happen for the purpose of inconveniencing speakers of other languages, or giving them material with which to spin conlang reform fantasies. English spelling as we know it today is the result of historical relics caused when spelling did not change after pronunciations changed, and also due to conflicting influences and tendencies being accommodated within the same system; if you can't handle that, then best not to bother with English (or restrict yourself to the spoken language only)... AnonMoos (talk) 09:34, 22 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Sadly, there's a growing tendency for young persons to say things like "In this box is [sic] a apple, a orange, a apricot, a abacus, a octopus, a elephant, a ultra light aircraft, a imitation diamond, a upper molar, a intrepid explorer, and a expired library book". (This may not be an actual quotation, you understand.) If newbies to the language copy such atrocities, as newbies are wont to do, heaven knows where it will all end. -- Jack of Oz[pleasantries] 22:53, 22 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It is the logical continuation of the n-dropping that started when people ceased to properly articulate an bōc, an cū, mīn cyningdōm for an hors, and so forth, and began to say a book, a cow. --Lambiam 22:53, 23 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
In my euphonious world, ugliness is never logical. The world I'm forced to live in against my will is populated by creatures with tin ears and hollow hearts and mashed brains. -- Jack of Oz[pleasantries] 23:23, 23 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The "rule" governing the use of a vs an is (apart from the "phonologically deviant prestige construction"[1] of an historic and the like) is completely independent of written English. It is acquired by English-speaking children before they begin to learn to read. ColinFine (talk) 09:47, 22 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I got confused when I saw an historic, but apparently it's a native variation, rather than a prescribed form. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 10:28, 22 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Yes: older/traditionalist BrE speakers use 'an' before 'h-' if the word is not stressed on the first syllable – so "a history lesson" but "an historic occasion". Usually the 'h' is barely pronounced at all, so the latter may sound like "an 'istoric occasion".
Then again, some varieties of informal/"lower class" accents/dialects drop the initial 'h' of all words, and therefore use 'an' before them. This is characteristic of, though not confined to, Cockney.
I myself do the former in written and formal speech, and the latter in informal speech. 94.2.67.173 (talk) 17:15, 22 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I knew about the Cockney 'abit of "dropping the aitches". I would assume there's been jokes about Cockney speakers hypercorrectingly saying stuff like "a hour", as well. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 17:45, 22 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
There's a gag in My Fair Lady where Higgins tries to get Eliza to sound the h's in the sentence "In Hertford, Hereford, and Hampshire, hurricanes hardly ever happen." She repeats it as "In 'ertford, 'ereford, and 'ampshire, 'urricanes 'ardly hever 'appen." Deor (talk) 18:00, 22 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Google finds this in an 1892 novel:
"What queer Henglish these Yankees speak! It's not Queen's Henglish, such as we native Londoners use at 'ome, my darlink."[18]
However, I lived in East London for the first 50 years of my life and have never heard anybody speak that way. Alansplodge (talk) 18:49, 22 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I have heard some Italians speaking English and randomly dropping or inserting aitches, though... 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 21:55, 22 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
What a mistake-a to make-a! DuncanHill (talk) 23:24, 22 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Is there any language where letter A can be pronounced as a consonant?
Why does Italian not write the etymological H in words like uomo, uovo, idrologia and avere?
Is there any Spanish dialect that has not undergone diphthongization of /o/ and /e/ to /ue/ and /ie/, and thus say ovo, porta, morto and cento instead of huevo, puerta, muerto and ciento?
1. All 28 letters of the Arabic alphabet are treated as consonants, including the first letter, alif, which in its long form can be considered the equivalent of the letter A. When used as a consonant, it is unvoiced (to simplify things greatly). Xuxl (talk) 14:20, 23 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Aleph seems to work that way in Semitic languages in general. --jpgordon𝄢𝄆𝄐𝄇 22:04, 24 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
In early Semitic alphabets, all the letters originally wrote consonant sounds (with a slow rise of "matres lectionis" in some languages). However in Arabic as it has developed, the letter 'alif only means a glottal stop when it has a hamza diacritic or similar. 'Alif without such a diacritic is either silent or a vowel letter...
2. I believe Italian orthography largely goes back to Dante Alighieri, and at that time, it wasn't considered necessary or relevant. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 10:20, 23 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
According to this timeline of the Italian language, "h" and "x" tended to disappear in the latter half of the 16th century, postdating Dante by a couple of centuries. But still, OP presents a stupid question. Why does Italian not write the useless leading H? Well, they do, to differentiate a few homophones. Otherwise, the answer is "because it's useless and scribes got tired of it." --jpgordon𝄢𝄆𝄐𝄇 16:55, 23 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
We could wish that it were a singular minutia, but it is cumulatively many minutiae. —Tamfang (talk) 03:36, 24 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Is there any Spanish dialect that has not undergone diphthongization of /o/ and /e/ to /ue/ and /ie/, and thus say ovo, porta, morto and cento instead of huevo, puerta, muerto and ciento?edit
I thought about Castrapo but the reference in the article has only one or two words where diphthongization could happen and the form is the Spanish one with diphthong.
I haven't looked into Portuñol.
--Error (talk) 01:32, 31 May 2024 (UTC)[reply] There is no such dialect which would be categorized as Spanish. deisenbe (talk) 18:41, 2 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
"Wouldn't you like to know?" origin/occurrenceedit
I've been trying to find the origin/early occurrences/etc. of the English phrase "Wouldn't you like to know?" used sarcastically. Wiktionary doesn't have an entry for it, OED just has its origin listed as "1860" with no cited source. It's difficult to search Google Books for because you often don't get enough context to tell at a glance if it's being used earnestly or not (the phrase seems to be used non-rhetorically fairly often even into the 20th century). I find this use[19] in an 1868 periodical, and while it is pointed out explicitly by the narrator that the use is sarcastic, it is clearly not a "novel" use or one that would be unfamiliar to the reader; it thus seems unlikely to me that this sense actually originates in the 1860s (or could language have really evolved that fast back then?). It's a weird set phrase that evolved from a phrase that otherwise has basically no meaning (as a modern native speaker it's hard to understand why one would ask "wouldn't you like to know" non-rhetorically). Google Ngrams shows a massive rise in usage starting around the year 2000, but this is almost certainly just a result of weighting errors (an artifact found near-universally when searching Ngrams). Any earlier sources/theories/similar evolutions would be appreciated -- I find no analogues with other English set phrases.
(As a side note, in asking a breadth of friends/family members/co-workers if they've ever heard a non-rhetorical (or further non-sarcastic) use of the phrase, I found that basically everyone born after Gen X remembers first encountering the phrase in the viral "Wouldn't you like to know, weather boy?" video from 2017. Google Ngrams shows literally zero bump in occurences from 2017, and relative usage actually decreases from then on... Obviously highly anecdotal, but interesting nonetheless.)
I'm seeing it in possibly-sarcastic usage in newspapers as far back as the 1850s. It was also the closing line of a Superman TV episode from 1952, where a seemingly intelligent computer is asked "Who is Superman?" and the computer gives that as the answer. ←Baseball BugsWhat's up, Doc?carrots→ 08:28, 23 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
This is an interesting question and having been born in 1952, the same year as the Superman TV episode Baseball Bugs mentioned, I was not exposed to its usage before the portrayal of artificial intelligence in that TV show. I think as a stark phrase, it is almost universally sarcastic and and often confrontational. But I can see it being used in an expanded form in another context. Imagine an educational TV segment about jewelry making where the host starts by saying, "Wouldn't you like to know how to make the delicate gold filigree on this necklace? Well, I am going to show you how." Cullen328 (talk) 08:48, 23 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I can push it back a little to a poem or song in a popular magazine:
I know a girl with teeth of pearl, / And shoulders white as snow; / She lives, - ah well, / I must not tell, / Wouldn't you like to know? / Her eyes are blue (celestial hue!) / And dazzling in their glow; / On whom they beam / With melting gleam, / Wouldn't you like to know?The Family Herald, London, 1864 (p. 42)
A bit more digging finds the sheet music for this, should you wish to sing along. Lyrics by John Godfrey Saxe and music by John Wallace Hutchinson of the Hutchinson Family Singers, dated 1862 in New York. The title of a song popular on both sides of the Atlantic seems a good starting point. Alansplodge (talk) 15:01, 23 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The Oxford American College Dictionary gives the meaning of this phrase as, "used to express the speaker's firm intention not to reveal something in spite of a questioner's curiosity". The speaker may intend to mock the questioner, but they may also be merely playful. --Lambiam 08:19, 24 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Before non-Protestant churches switched to vernacularedit
How much of the church service would the average blue-collar farmer or unskilled worker understand at different times and places? Did they know more than they would of a speech even more different from the holy church language but as different from vernacular as vernacular is from ecclesiastical? If you hear it so much and it's important to you you'd realize some stuff even if you weren't taught right? Presumably the Romance area people and those closer in time to when the priests' vernacular was "corrected" would understand more than Germanic branch and 1+ millennium later people and the non-Indo Europeans would have the steepest learning curve of all. Also how different would the Romance tongues be now if the Western Empire borders more or less followed this timeline's fuzzy Western Christianity frontier and the educated Romans had tried to get everyone to speak Classical Latin or a compromise of the different Vulgar Latins? Maybe with compulsory education from 5 to 16? Not that I wish it, probably no one could predict butterfly effects enough to say which timeline they'd rather be born in all other things equal (i.e. level of birth luck and tech. I always wondered what year's tech would be most like now if Rome survived and if it'd conquer Earth like an asshole or be conquered by higher tech) Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 16:28, 26 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
As explained in the book "Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World" by Nicholas Ostler, before the ca. 800 AD reforms introduced by Alcuin, parish priests in Romance-speaking areas of Europe pronounced Latin texts out loud in the local spoken vernacular, and most of them were not really aware that the ancient Latin language had been different from their current local spoken vernacular. As late as Dante's time, some people were confused on this point, and he had to explain it in detail in his De vulgari eloquentia. Preserving a correspondence with a written language in one's spoken language over the long term works best when you have a small somewhat isolated and homogenous community of language speakers, as conspicuously in the case of Iceland -- and even in that case, the phonology of Icelandic has changed a fair amount since the sagas were written down. I really don't know how it could work in a large heterogenous realm such as the Roman Empire (united or disunited)... AnonMoos (talk) 23:23, 26 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Would say Brandenburg or Moscow peasants know some words? A few roots could trickle down or be guessed from thousands of church services? Were the readings or even homily in God language too though presumably there'd be some vernacular i.e. confessions and teaching Christianity to youth. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 00:16, 27 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Not sure what Moscow has to do with it, since Latin was never the liturgical language there (unless very briefly during the Polish-Lithuanian occupation of Moscow). P.S. For a rather ugly version of a Roman Empire surviving until the 20th century, see the classic Murray Leinster short story "Sidewise in Time", which in some ways founded the whole alternative history genre. For a more nuanced version, see "Roma Eterna" by Robert Silverberg... AnonMoos (talk) 02:28, 27 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I thought they used Greek at times? Or did they switch to Slavic branch ASAP? (why were they more flexible using Slavic branch (vernacular?) in Old Church Slavonic area then (in at least some churches) fossilizing again? Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 16:00, 28 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The Roman Catholic mass was in Latin until Vatican II in 1965. I remember the mass being in Latin when I was a child (in the US). If I recall correctly, there were booklets in each pew containing the Latin text along with an English translation, so anyone who wished to do so could follow along and understand what was being said (assuming they could read English). I don't know when or where such translation booklets came into use. I don't really understand the last half of this question about Rome surviving or what that has to do with the language of the mass. CodeTalker (talk) 05:32, 27 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
How similar would the Romance languages be if the educated Romans tried to nip Classical Latin fragmentation in the bud instead of not caring how the commoners spoke and if the Western Romans had also stayed united with borders similar to Western Christianity or the Roman Catholic Church? Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 16:08, 28 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
As a related matter, Haitian Vodou took on its local form because French priests insisted that African slaves attend Christian services conducted in Latin, but never bothered to teach them anything about what any of it meant, so the slaves adopted and adapted images of Catholic icons to portray the West African gods they remembered. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.2.67.173 (talk) 20:58, 27 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Long before 1965, Catechisms occurred in the vernacular languages, sometimes translated orally on the fly by the catechizer, but with the rise of printing, printed vernacular catechism books increasingly appeared. The first book printed in the Quechua language (also the first in the Aymara language) was a catechism, as were the first books printed in some European languages (Finnish, Latvian, and Lithuanian), though in those cases usually Protestant. Of course, in Saint-Domingue (French colonial Haiti) there was the additional issue of the French language vs. Haitian Creole... AnonMoos (talk) 04:37, 28 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Of course, not all services were in Latin. Before the Reformation, for example, the marriage service was in English, and possibly the baptism service as well. Surreptitious translations of parts of the Bible date back to Saxon times. 2A00:23D0:492:6301:207B:B2D7:62D2:2142 (talk) 11:24, 1 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
What would be the correct translation into English of the French 'voltaïque' (i.e. someone from Upper Volta)? Voltaic or Voltan? -- Soman (talk) 18:58, 26 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
That may be so, but Google Books Ngrams shows that "Upper Voltan" was by far the most common term of the three in the era between its independence and its name change to Burkina Faso. I know "Voltaic" (apart from its electrical sense) only as an older term for the Gur subfamily of languages. —Mahāgaja · talk 21:30, 26 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
You're right, the CIA agrees and I've changed the article accordingly. --Wrongfilter (talk) 21:40, 26 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Both pronunciations occur in American English. I would say that when "route" occurs before a number, the "oo" pronunciation is preferred, while in a phrase such as "postal route", the "ow" pronunciation would be preferred, at least in my speech. AnonMoos (talk) 02:15, 27 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah, same. I think the standard is that there is no standard. Matt Deres (talk) 20:22, 27 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Add another vote to the "both ways occur in virtually all circumstances" column. In more detail, it is always "Root" 66 (other, less famous, roads can vary), but mail delivery in the country is by rural "rowts". Other than those two (very specific) examples, I come across (and use) both versions fairly commonly. I would probably ask someone what "root" they took to get somewhere, but would also ask that a message get "rowted" to the proper person. But the oppsite usages would not surprise me at all. --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 22:54, 27 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
That's been my experience with NA English: "root" is the pronunciation for nouns; "rowt" for verbs. Folly Mox (talk) 16:15, 28 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
And that box that gets you internet access.... is that a rooter or a rowter? Thanks. Martinevans123 (talk) 20:52, 27 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Despite the tossup between root and rowt for route, everyone I know/have asked (a sample of people that is mostly American) pronounces router as rowt-er. GalacticShoe (talk) 23:58, 27 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
In British English a router is pronounced "rowter", but a router is pronounced "rooter". DuncanHill (talk) 00:07, 28 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
In America, I've always heard the electronic device pronounced "rowter". Thought I can see why "rooter" makes more sense etymologically. ←Baseball BugsWhat's up, Doc?carrots→ 03:40, 29 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
In Australia they seem to say "rowter" for router, possibly because of the usual meaning of the word root. Strangely though, road numbers are referred as "roots" not "rowts". Router is pronounced "rowter". TrogWoolley (talk) 09:05, 30 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I suppose "My router keeps going down" would mean something else entirely if they used the "rooter" pronunciation. DuncanHill (talk) 21:44, 31 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'm always amused by senior US Army officers pronouncing route as a homophone of rout; "a panicked, disorderly and undisciplined retreat of troops from a battlefield". The potential for misunderstanding seems obvious. Alansplodge (talk) 16:02, 28 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Note that the square root of 66 is an irrational number, 8.12403840464... Driving an infinite time should give a precise result at either end. --Cookatoo.ergo.ZooM (talk) 17:14, 28 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Based on 40 years of working with the woodworking power tool, with the scars to prove it, I can attest that the power tool is always pronounced "rowter" in the United States. Cullen328 (talk) 06:28, 29 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Australians are not particularly known for adopting American ways, but the above is the only way we have ever said "mall". In fact, the first time I heard the Mall (in London) pronounced to rhyme with pal, gal, Sal, shall or Val, I thought, These silly English people don't even know how to speak their own language. The things one discovers. -- Jack of Oz[pleasantries] 01:38, 2 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The term "mall" referring to a shopping centre is short for "shopping mall". The first uses of "shopping mall" were in the US, referring to a "pedestrian mall" lined on both sides with shops. Pedestrian malls were popular in the 60s, and that is when the term "shopping mall" came to be used in the sense of shopping centre. It was generalized to shopping centres in other forms than pedestrian malls when this type became less popular, the first step being the covered shopping mall. As pedestrian malls became rare, the remaining "malls" were shopping malls, so dropping the redundant qualifier "shopping" was a natural step. When the UK use of the term "mall" for a shopping centre was copied from the US, so was its pronunciation, but only for this new sense. --Lambiam 06:11, 2 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
What is the etymology of calling proposals/requests motions in some formal contexts? I move to/motion to dismiss, I move for [something I hope judge allows], parliamentary motion and so on. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 04:18, 29 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
In the United States and perhaps elsewhere , Robert's Rules of Order has had enormous influence on such terminology outside the context of courts and legislatures. The section on "Motions" has lots of useful links. Cullen328 (talk) 05:24, 29 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Only in their technical parliamentary senses. Both words, move and motion, can be used in non-technical senses as nouns as well as as verbs. --Lambiam 07:51, 29 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
There is a somewhat slow-moving discussion at Talk:Don't You Worry 'bout a Thing#Ukraingia about the pronunciation (and possible meaning) of a word in Stevie's spoken introduction of the song. The neologism in question occurs at 25 seconds. Anybody know what it is? There are unlikely to be any RS sources for this. I suspect Wonder himself wanted most of that jive to sound as impenetrable as possible. So maybe we shouldn't even try. Martinevans123 (talk) 09:34, 29 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'd never heard the song before, but I listened to it and it definitely sounds like Eurasia to me. A K sound would be easy to pick out, and he doesn't enunciate K at all. I agree with all you wrote on the talk page, and it seems daft for your nemesis to assume that Wonder just picked the word "Ukraingia" out of a hat (or an atlas). --Viennese Waltz 10:05, 29 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Yes. Or maybe, being a musical creative genius, he just made it all up in his head, in the studio, on the spur of the moment? Martinevans123 (talk) 12:10, 29 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Martinevans123: I agree. I've added a comment to the article's talk page to that effect. Bazza 7 (talk) 13:46, 29 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I agree it sounds like Eurasia: a technical and uncommon term but a very unspecific location, achieving the effect of self-exaggerated worldliness. Also Ukraine will have been labelled "Ukrainian SSR" in maps at the time. Meanwhile the second item might indeed be Beirut rather than Peru (with an unenunciated or unreleased final /t/), both because of how the first syllable sounds and because of the geographic locale. --Theurgist (talk) 22:56, 31 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, I've always thought it might be Beiru'. Martinevans123 (talk) 10:42, 1 June 2024 (UTC) ...you might want to attempt an IPA transcription of that introductory passage that follows the opening "Eek! Eek!".... but just /ˈwɔt͡ʃjɔɹˈsɛlf/[reply]
I don't really hear any diphthong, there. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 12:00, 1 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
But neither is it reduced to [ə]. Also, unlike the initial consonant of Paris, the one here doesn't seem to be aspirated; for pairs like /p/ and /b/, the aspiration or lack thereof is said to be more of a distinctive feature than the actual voicing. But then, this syllable is unstressed, which may have neutralized that. --Theurgist (talk) 20:41, 2 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Can someone’s native language affect how they hear other languages?edit
Can the phonology and sound rules of someone’s native language affect how they hear other languages (or how their brain processes the sounds being heard)? For example, say a person whose native language is one that does not allow consonant clusters or syllables ending in consonants (and who is not greatly familiar with any other languages) listens to someone speaking a different language that lacks these rules. Would the listener hear the speaker as vowel-padding their syllables, thus making them more akin to the syllable structure of the listener’s own language, even if the speaker is not actually doing such? Primal Groudon (talk) 00:49, 31 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
As a native English speaker, my first three years or so learning Chinese I had a lot of difficulty differentiating /i/ and /y/, let alone tones one and two. And I was a lot less deaf back then. So anecdotally yes. Folly Mox (talk) 00:54, 31 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Whatever the language, all listeners rely on visual information to a degree in speech perception. But the McGurk effect's intensity differs across languages. Dutch,[37] English, Spanish, German, Italian and Turkish [38] language listeners experience a robust McGurk effect; Japanese and Chinese listeners, weaker.[39] Most research on the McGurk effect between languages has been between English and Japanese. A smaller McGurk effect occurs in Japanese listeners than English listeners.[37][40][41][42][43][44] The cultural practice of face avoidance in Japanese people may diminish the McGurk effect, as well as tone and syllabic structures of the language.[37] This could also be why Chinese listeners are less susceptible to visual cues, and similar to Japanese, produce a smaller effect than English listeners.[37] Studies also show that Japanese listeners do not show a developmental increase in visual influence after six, as English children do.[40][41] Japanese listeners identify incompatibility between visual and auditory stimuli better than English listeners.[37][41] This greater ability could relate to Japanese's lacking consonant clusters.[37][42] Regardless, listeners of all languages resort to visual stimuli when speech is unintelligible; the McGurk effect then applies to them equally.[37][42] The McGurk effect works with listeners of every tested language.[10]
Speakers of languages in which [ɑ] and [a] are effectively allophones (e.g. Turkish) may have a hard time hearing the distinction between, for example, Dutch man ("man") and maan ("moon"); they sound the same to them. Similarly, Russian lacks a voiced or voiceless glottal fricative, so Russian speakers, hearing one, tend to map it to their phoneme /x/. Consequently, they then hear the Dutch spoken word hoed ("hat") as if the speaker said goed ("good").
Children of expats who were exposed at a young age to another language than their mother's tongue, and then move back with their parents even before they start to speak, have been shown to have an easier time later in life learning that other language's phonemic system than people who did not have such exposure. Apparently, the neural net for mapping the sounds to phonemes was developed at a young age and, while unused, remained somewhat functional. --Lambiam 07:13, 31 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
My sister speaks some Dutch, and was told that when she tried to say "hale good" (standard reply to "how are you?") it came out as "yellow hat" – spoonerizing the ‹h› /h/ and ‹g› /x/. —Tamfang (talk) 20:31, 2 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
For sure. The way the speaker of a given language hears a foreign language is reflected in the resulting "accent" associated with the native speaker's language. ←Baseball BugsWhat's up, Doc?carrots→ 13:26, 31 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
A possibly Norwegian woman taking refuge in a seaside town in eastern England during the second world war wanted eggs and carefully enunciated the word to the shopkeeper to ensure he would understand her, but it came out "eks" and he was bemused. I can say no more as I don't speak Norwegian. 2A00:23D0:492:6301:207B:B2D7:62D2:2142 (talk) 11:45, 1 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I once heard a slightly agitated Dutch traveler, about to disembark, tell a flight attendant that he wanted his rat back. It turned out, after some confusion, that he was looking for a red bag. --Lambiam 14:57, 1 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I spent hours with a Portuguese friend who was telling me I say não with the wrong vowel. I'd say it exactly as she said it, then she'd say I was getting it wrong, and as explanation, she'd repeat it the same way again. Eventually she got tired, and said she was slippy. Card Zero (talk) 09:33, 2 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Not just between languages but even between dialects. I have the Pin–pen merger and cannot reliable hear or say the difference in those two words in my own language. Rmhermen (talk) 14:21, 2 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Card Zero: There was a forum comment yesterday "I did re-add Born Slippy to my Spotify playlist so some good has come from this interaction" [24]. I never heard the expression before. 92.25.129.245 (talk) 09:31, 3 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.
I don't think that Will Adam became Archdeacon of Canterbury by chance [25] (at 18:47). Don't you think that Keir Starmer looks a lot like Will Adam and [redacted] these days? Favonian appears to think so [26]. Will Adam's career at University and beyond mirrors that of [redacted] in many ways. After Favonian's intervention the interview with Adam was pulled from the University's website. - 92.25.128.239 10:08, 17 May 2024
And that was before the Diane Abbott debacle! Harking back to Future Perfect at Sunrise's outburst (08:06, 3 September 2008) Jon Stewart tells Fox News to "go f**k itself.[1] Patrick Kidd in the Times of 23 May puts it very well:
Vennells is not a sympathetic figure, who seems to have lacked the charity and good faith [administrators please note] towards her flock that one might hope from an ordained priest. Anthony Trollope, that chronicler of Victorian churchmen as well as a high-up Post Office administrator in his day, would have depicted her as a rather cold and managerial archdeacon.
Is there a connection between these sentences or do they concern unrelated topics collected under one heading? As archdeacons of the Church of England are not selected by sortition, it is fairly certain that Adam's appointment was not "by chance". --Lambiam 11:50, 1 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
"We don't answer requests for opinions, predictions or debate." --ColinFine (talk) 14:18, 1 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Listen to the Exciters song "Tell Him". The chorus is in E major, but (according to all sheet music sources for this song) the final word "now" is on an E minor chord. This is the reverse of a picardy third. Does this have a special name?? Georgia guy (talk) 18:54, 23 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
On a listen, the chorus in the Exciters version is in F major, and the guitarist clearly comps F major on that final word/the following final two bars of the chorus. The original version (performed by Gil Hamilton, as "Tell Her") has the chorus in Bb major, and the harmony for the bars in question is similarly Bb major. The same transcription error popping up in multiple sheet music sources is a relatively common occurrence in popular song, usually stemming from an error in a hastily-made fake book chart that later gets copied into "official" transcriptions/arrangements.
If such a harmonic progression had occured here (to a minor chord), it would be considered a type of modulation to the parallel minor (sometimes termed "parallel modulation"), as the following sections (the verses) are in an F minor tonality. In addition, the term "Picardy third" is typically only applied to the end of a work/large structural section (the latter chiefly in Western classical music), so a movement at the end of a verse-chorus form section isn't quite analogous. (fugues) (talk) 01:16, 24 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Where do people look for written scores these days, preferably open-source & academic types instead of sketchy sites and annoying apps? I would love a Carol of the Bells in four voices. Temerarius (talk) 02:43, 27 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Temerarius: Try IMSLP for public-domain works. Unfortunately, the English lyrics are still under copyright, so the scores only have lyrics in Ukrainian (as well as Italian and Spanish translations by respective editors who released them under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). Double sharp (talk) 08:08, 27 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It's possible that he had heard of it, but as the first English translations appeared in 2022, and I'm fairly sure that Lovecraft could not read Arabic (or Urdu or Turkish, into which it has also been translated), he would likely not have known it in detail.
In his Lovecraft: A Biography (New York, Doubleday, 1975), L.Sprague de Camp states (p167) that "The name [Necronomicon] was probably suggested by the Astronomica of Manilius . . . quoted by Lovecraft in his newspaper columns." De Camp goes on to cite a number of real, legendary and fictional books that Lovecraft mentioned in prose and correspondence, but Shams al-Ma'arif is not amongst them.
Those real books include William Scott-Elliot's The Story of Atlantis (1896) and The Lost Lemuria (1904), Joseph Glanvil's [sic] Sadducismus Triumphatus (1668, published 1681), The ancient Egyptian Book of Thoth, and Helena Blavatsky's The Book of Dzyan (plagiarised from Sanscrit texts).
Of course, Lovecraft was a voluminous correspondent, and it's possible that references to Shams al-Ma'arif have turned up in papers of his studied since 1975. I can certainly see why you make the suggestion.
One further possibility: Lovecraft was an avid fan of The One Thousand and One Nights from early childhood, and in two separate letters recounted that he adopted the pseudonym of Abdul Alhazred around the age of five (see Lin Carter Lovecraft: A Look Behind the Cthulhu Mythos (New York, Ballantine Books, 1972, Chapter 1)). Having access to his maternal grandfather's "voluminous" library, he probably read an adult rather than child's version, so if Shams al-Ma'arif is mentioned, he would have learned of its existence thus. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.2.67.173 (talk) 20:29, 27 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Other potential sources of inspiration are the Picatrix and the Kitāb al-nawāmīs, of which the text was accessible. --Lambiam 09:48, 28 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'm curious at what point writers and filmmakers say "that won't work" or "we can't do it that way" to allow the suspension of disbelief to function. I just watched The Killer (2023), and the only problem I had with the entire film was when The Killer travels to Florida to take out "The Brute" who tried to kill him in his absence and beat his girlfriend instead. This scene makes no sense to me, and I'm surprised the writers and the filmmakers wrote and shot it this way. What's even stranger to me is that fans are saying its the best part of the film. I don't get it, as I see it as the worst scene of the entire production. The Killer is much smaller than The Brute, doesn't know the layout of his place, and yet manages to take out this guy in his own home because The Brute has a limp. The Brute has the upper hand in almost ever aspect of the fight, yet The Killer somehow manages to kill the guy. What is the calculus the writer and director use here? It doesn't work for me at all, yet the fans seem to dig it simply because of the extended, gratuitous fight scene, a fight that makes no sense at all, and in reality, The Killer should have lost. Viriditas (talk) 21:50, 28 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
You have clearly not yet suspended your disbelief. As this was a requirement incumbent upon you as a consumer of this production, you have failed to uphold your end of the deal, and the producers are entitled to sue you for breach of contract. -- Jack of Oz[pleasantries] 22:40, 28 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I mean, at least in something like The Matrix, we are allowed to suspend disbelief because the characters can get away with whatever they want in the computer simulated world (but the consequences remain just as deadly). I just did a marathon rewatch of all The Matrix films, and this idea was executed flawlessly (although I quibble with the notion of free will and determinism that is implicit in the story, as it it's quite confusing for the audience). But I don't see that happening at a scriptural level in the writing with The Killer. Why am I supposed to believe that The Killer, who is clearly suffering from sleep deprivation and anxiety, is able to defeat another killer who is twice his size and is fighting on his home turf? It doesn't work for me, but yet, it seems to work for others. My question is why do most people accept this? Viriditas (talk) 22:47, 28 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The hero prevails against seemingly impossible odds. It's a very old device. -- Jack of Oz[pleasantries] 23:03, 28 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Indeed. Vintage Hollywood westerns have the bad guys firing off hundreds of rounds without hitting anything, but the good guy can hit a man hiding behind a rock 200 yards away with one shot from his revolver. Alansplodge (talk) 11:01, 29 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Or going further back, in a one battle, King Arthur managed to kill 470 Saxons with his own sword and emerge unscathed. [27]Alansplodge (talk) 11:08, 29 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
No, no, nothing so moderate. Geoffrey of Monmouth reduced that figure from the 960 men he found in his source, or more likely the numeral D (500) got left out and an extra X got added somewhere in the manuscript transmission. Roman numerals normally seem to get corrupted in that sort of way after a chain of tired monks have copied them. --Antiquary (talk) 12:29, 29 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Now that you mention it, I wonder if the limp of The Brute was a mythological reference to the Achilles' heel. Viriditas (talk) 23:09, 28 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
When I watched The Matrix I couldn't believe that humans work as electric generators. The bullet time and such effects were good but it seemed a big plot hole. I didn't watch the following sequels. --Error (talk) 01:13, 31 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Nevertheless, entertainment that jolts the viewers out of their suspension of disbelief by an obvious absurdity is not well written. I too noticed this at the time, thought it silly, and have not bothered to watch the sequels.
I have a theory that makers of Hollywood-level 'Sci-Fi' films (and TV) have read Science Fiction in their teens, when it was less well developed as a literary form, but not subsequently because they were too busy with their general careers: consequently, when they come to make science-fiction films, they model them on the older, inferior standards they remember. If their competitors are doing the same, they all form a 'bubble of unsophistication'. To my perception (as an aged written SF & Fantasy fan), film and TV SF&F usually (though not invariably) lag a few decades behind the written forms in quality of (screen)writing. This even applies to many film versions of literarily successful novels and stories, which get unnecessarily 'disimproved' by screenwriters who overestimate their own abilities. [/rant]. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.2.67.173 (talk) 12:58, 31 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Could well be. And I recall Siskel and Ebert talking about what they called the "idiot plot", in which the premise is so absurd that the audience can't fully buy into it. ←Baseball BugsWhat's up, Doc?carrots→ 13:43, 31 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I've never read a word of Agatha Christie's novels, but I'm told the resolution often depends on some information that no reader could possibly have anticipated from the foregoing plot, and which is revealed only by the detective (Poirot, Marple, whomever) at the end. Yet Christie is the best-selling fiction writer of all time, her novels having sold more than two billion copies, so readers show no sign of having been put off by her approach. -- Jack of Oz[pleasantries] 21:45, 31 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
That was also the deal with the old "Perry Mason" TV series. There was no way to figure it out. So you could turn the show on during the last 5 minutes and still get the full gist of it. This is in contrast to modern TV cop shows, where the perp often turns out to be someone who briefly appeared on-screen early in the show. So then the guessing game becomes, which early character will it turn out to be. ←Baseball BugsWhat's up, Doc?carrots→ 01:18, 1 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Although it's a few decades since I read (quite a few of) Christie's novels, this is not how I remember them. As I recall, they sometimes hinged on fairly obscure knowledge, but never produced anything 'out of thin air': there was always some deliberately unemphasised clue to the mystery earlier in the story, so that when the answer was revealed one was annoyed for not having spotted it.
Christie was a prominent member of the Detection Club, whose (loosely adhered-to) principles discouraged impossible-to-guess solutions. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.2.67.173 (talk) 01:25, 1 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah, the battery thing was ridiculous, but Lana Wachowski cleared this up a while ago, saying the original story didn't use humans as batteries, they were used as a kind of neural network or CPU, but the bean counters in suits didn't understand it and asked the Wachowskis to change it to batteries, which of course makes no sense. Viriditas (talk) 02:27, 2 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Why was Ø (Disambiguation) given that title? Did the creators want to parody Wikipedia, or what? Nyttend (talk) 04:04, 1 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
We do have an article with the title "Ø (disambiguation)". Maybe the album's title was intended as an homage. Note that the band styled its name as UNDERØATH on an earlier album. --Lambiam 12:11, 1 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
usefulness of complex-input FFTs in audio spectral analysisedit
Since I've implemented a feature to treat stereo audio as complex numbers in one of my own audio spectrum analyzer projects over CodePen, I'm curious about whether or not is there any useful cases of complex-input FFTs as in the case of I/Q signals on any SDR-related stuff, being performed in typical two-channel audio? BTW, I'm not talking about the performance benefits of using one complex-input FFT to visualize two spectrums for each channel, which is the same, plus the "unscrambling" operation to make it look like individual FFTs of each channels. 2001:448A:3070:DF54:98E8:4EDF:605:8379 (talk) 00:59, 20 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The Discrete Fourier transform (DFT) that converts a sequence of data samples to a set of complex coefficients of frequencies is directly applicable for spectral analysis. The frequency domain representation of the input sequence allows many useful signal processes, including frequency-selective filters, and the filtered frequency coefficients can be converted back to real data by means of an Inverse DFT.
Mathematically a DFT converts a sequence of Ncomplex numbers into another sequence of complex numbers, which is defined by:
Discrete Fourier transform
()
The operation is computationally intensive as N must be large enough for a required frequency resolution but it can be speeded by the digital FFT (Fast Fourier transform) algorithm. A further simplification is that for a real signal such as audio from one microphone, only real values of need be processed i.e. the imaginary value of each sample can be zero. Such real-data-in, complex-values-out usage of FFTs is commonplace. However it is useful to note that the zeroed imaginary data points potentially offer themselves as a second, independant data stream. The OP cites a .pdf that correctly demonstrates that two stereo audio signals can be combined as real and complex inputs to a single FFT. That one FFT can process two signals without interference is demonstrable by recovering the signal samples in an IDFT thus:
Inverse transform
()
While the economy of using a single FFT to process both stereo channels is obvious it is less obvious that any two real input data streams may be applied as there really is no interference between them. Noting that the algorithms for forward and inverse DFTs are similar, a system programmer will usually write code that is reusable for both and has provision for complex input data, even if that is superfluous for the DFT, because it is always demanded for IDFT. Apart from audio applications, an IDFT/DFT pair is useful as digital Codec in digital carrier Phase-shift keying modulations BPSK (real values) and QPSK (complex values). Philvoids (talk) 19:58, 20 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Philvoids Thanks for a lengthy explanation but what I meant by "complex-input FFTs" as in this CodePen project is simply treating stereo pairs or even Mid/Side representations as complex numbers and do no postprocessing at all and simply display two graphs with different colors; the first one is as usual as regular FFT spectrum, and the second graph is exactly the same but the ordering of FFT bins is reversed since we provided an FFT a complex-valued input, the output is no longer conjugate-symmetric, which could display stereo FFT in a different way (one graph is higher in amplitude than other means being closer to 90° out-of-phase, either clockwise or counterclockwise) and might have practical uses or is it? 114.5.253.252 (talk) 18:50, 21 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
While agreeing that a single FFT can treat samples of a stereo pair as complex numbers, I have not found more useful references than those already given for your on-going project; it feels more like a "solution looking for a problem" than a "problem looking for a solution"! We also cannot speculate or know whether your interest is theoretical curiosity or you have an application or product plan. Philvoids (talk) 03:04, 22 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I agree with @Philvoids and this DSP related thread about the same topic in regards of treating stereo sample as complex numbers, I'm just curious why people bringing up some performance improvements of stereo FFT by treating an input as complex numbers for a single FFT and doing "unscrambling" operation afterwards instead of other niche stuffs using same FFT as for I/Q radio signals but for audio? Sure, it could identify TSAC-encoded music with the same complex-input FFTs as for I/Q signals as "holes" in one (red) graph at higher frequencies (around 15kHz) as in this image on this HA thread about the same topic. 114.5.249.110 (talk) 21:40, 22 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Calendar change and historical procrastinationedit
Initially, only a few countries already switched to the Gregorian calendar in 1582. But then, as the centuries go by, more and more countries followed the calendar change, including Great Britain in 1752. This continued all the way until the year 1923 in Greece.
So, could such a long waiting be considered as a kind of procrastination? Procrastination means putting off tasks to a later date, and the task relevant to this question is that of switching to the Gregorian calendar. One of the negative consequences is that the longer you waited, the more days you had to drop from the Julian calendar. Changes in the 1500s, 1600s, 1700s, 1800s, and 1900s required 10, 10, 11, 12, and 13 days to be dropped, respectively (note that 1600 was a leap year in both calendars, so no additional day needs to be dropped until 1700).
It could depend on each country's rationale for resisting. One possibility could be anti-Catholic bias. ←Baseball BugsWhat's up, Doc?carrots→ 18:03, 20 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
We must be patient. An agreement on the term honcho picked up 1947-1953 by U.S. servicemen from Japanese hancho "group leader" has still not been reached in catholic churches since the East–West Schism of 1054. Philvoids (talk) 21:01, 20 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
This is a little off-topic, but does anyone understand why they didn't just say, OK, we're changing the schedule of leap years going forward, but we're not dropping any days from the current calendar? It's weird to me that they preferred to set the correlation between seasons and the calendar to something it hadn't been in living memory. I could maybe understand if it were a date-of-Easter thing, but Easter has never gone by the solar calendar anyway, so that also doesn't make sense. --Trovatore (talk) 19:32, 20 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
325AD was important, Christmas (second most important after Easter) is solar and Easter falling up to 7+30 or 7+29 days later than the Sunday after the first spring Full Moon and up to ~10 days later in spring than could in 325 made them feel icky. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 00:45, 21 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
On a smaller scale, we have the 19-second difference between GPS time and International Atomic Time, and the running difference between those and Coordinated Universal Time, occasioned by one of the worst ideas in the history of human timekeeping. When they finally get rid of the stupid thing and treat the pose of the Earth as just another ephemeris, like they should have done for at least fifty years, it will be interesting to see whether they attempt some unification, or just have three separate clocks with a fixed difference of a few seconds. --Trovatore (talk) 19:43, 20 May 2024 (UTC) [reply]
That would be a sin and make astronomers and some sailors feel icky. Astronomers deal with way more than three clocks per location and the 70 second difference from the endlessly slowing spin crossing 24 SI hours in like 1820 all the time, suck it up programmers. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 00:45, 21 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It's the astronomers who need to suck it up and treat the Earth's pose as just another ephemeris. --Trovatore (talk) 00:49, 21 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The astronomers have to do that anyway, because leap seconds only get you to the nearest second or so, and that is often not good enough. The UT1-UTC ephemeris can be predicted pretty well into the future, except for leap seconds. Leap seconds throw it off completely because they are a political decision and cannot be reliably predicted beforehand. They also introduce a discontinuity so that you have to be careful when interpolating. [28] So getting rid of leap seconds would probably make it easier for the astronomers. (It might still be true that it would also make them feel icky.) —Amble (talk) 02:46, 21 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
According to the linked article, the current plan after leap seconds are ended by 2035 is either for a leap minute or leap hour in the future, so I'm not sure it makes sense to unify them when they're going to drift again in the future. I mean it would be slightly cleaner since whatever they chose future changes would be in that whole number and so the difference would always be in that number of units. OTOH, it doesn't seem like that number is that significant for most purposes, so I wonder if they will care. Also I wonder if the more likely plan if it's decided to keep the difference in whole units, might be for the first "leap minute" or "leap hour" to actually be slightly less or more than an actual minute or hour and use that to hit on a whole number of unit. Note that there's some suggestion that a negative leap second may be coming perhaps before 2035 and so that may need to be dealt with either by eliminating leap seconds sooner, or simply skipping it even if it's technically required under the current system; rather than risk finding out what software bugs may exist for something which won't be needed for much longer [29] (although assuming the leap minute or leap hour ideas go ahead, it's theoretically possible they would need it). Nil Einne (talk) 11:06, 22 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
BTW, do astronomers really have much to do with it? While not well discussed, from what is discussed and common sense I think the bigger issue may be the desire of some countries for UTC to be fairly tied to TAI but also have 1200 in their local time zone (which is tied to UTC) be roughly midday (depending on their local timezones) rather then for it to potentially be midnight sometime in the distance future. (Well that's a fairly distant thing, but it sounds like some are even unhappy with it diverging by even an hour.) The counter argument that there is already so much variance given the spread of timezones etc seems to have won out for the leap minute or maybe even the leap hour. But as this time, I think they're still unhappy with the eventual possibility it could indeed be midnight during 1200 in the future. Nil Einne (talk) 11:19, 22 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Any large discrepancies would be way in the future, and barring enormous advances in life extension, are not going to affect us. Anyone they will affect would be born in a world in which it's not that different, so they'll have plenty of time to get used to it.
Without leap seconds, a person who lives 120 years will see nominal average sunset times shift by, what, 90 seconds or something? Come on, there's no way this is seriously a problem. Leap seconds are just a really really bad idea, and hopefully they'll expunge them with all deliberate speed. --Trovatore (talk) 18:53, 22 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Anyone so irritated by leap seconds needs to use GPS time or an International Standard Computing Time that equals UTC at the conference creating the standard or maybe TAI. If done soon that would give many, many months to reprogram before the next leap second (Earth's recently been spinning close to the UTC accumulation and unusually close to the SI rate based on human knowledge right before the slowdown was first measured which was based on 18th and 19th century position measurements). Computers already convert UTC to time zone, just use atomic time and leave UTC alone. Also we have to make time impure for all time cause idiots didn't change Unix time to the actual number of SI seconds by the 1990s when computer clocks became accurate enough or 2001 when they made 2100 a leap year? Leap seconds are perfect! Pure unsmeared SI seconds except 1 second every few years on average (6 months happened once) and it can't more than 0.9 seconds wrong. Also you do know it's quadratic right? People shouldn't be boiled to wrongness they wouldn't accept all at once in the same lifetime like the leap hour in 2600 (fucking night owls' sleep by making 8am earlier in the day till it happens. New York Cityans who could wake up 11.5+ hours after sunset and 0.5+ hours after sunrise without risking lateness would have to wake up ≤11 hours after sunset and (c. Jan 4 and Nov 5-6 DST) at sunrise or before like a weirdo morning person). If I didn't grow up in it I'd think daylight savings is an abomination instead of mixed feelings more pro than con (DST also fucks sleep but I never knew anything else). Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 22:00, 22 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Time is time; the Earth moves somewhat irregularly with time. There is no reason our timekeeping needs to follow the Earth's foibles.
Just freeze the current difference between UTC and TAI now and forever, and then we can keep using UTC. Sure, our great-to-the-nth grandchildren may be getting up at 3 AM or 3 PM or whatever, and they'll think the name "midnight" is kinda weird and that time references in old literature don't make a lot of sense, until someone remembers that it's drifted since then. Of course human schedules will adjust to move with the Sun, not with the clocks.
So what? It's a little like the scene in It's a Wonderful Life where George Bailey is offered the amazing salary of $25,000 per year, beyond dreams of avarice, and is briefly tempted. You can watch that and understand it; even if you don't know just how much that would buy you, you understand it's a lot. --Trovatore (talk) 22:15, 22 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
9 to 5 has never been 10 to 6 or 11 to 7 in double war time, it'd reach insanely discriminatory levels before it'd be 10 to 6! Schools discriminate against teens, industry lobbyists discriminate against night owls (the theater, nightlife etc lobbies are collectively weaker than the golf, bike etc lobbies). We expanded DST as much as we could (Nov 6 very competitive with latest post-Nov day in sunrise lateness at 40N near the meridian), we're used to it, it delays ugly June dawn, there's no room for more. Enough circadian rhythm bigotry. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 04:51, 23 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Delays the June dawn? Nonsense. The dawn is when it was always going to be. We're just putting a different number to it. You don't have to let that number control when you do things; it's just a number, not a cop.
Now, granted, sometimes you have constraints based on when other people want to do things. But again, there's no need for them to schedule them according to any particular time coordinate. If you don't like when they want to do it, well, push back!
I'm reminded of when I had a summer job working for IBM in Tucson. We had some flexibility in our hours, but the people I was riding with wanted to do the 7:00 AM to 3:42 PM schedule (IYKYK on the 42 minutes). Insane, right?
Not so much. Arizona doesn't observe DST, so that's 7:00 AM Mountain Standard Time, which would be 8 if they observed DST. Also, Tucson is further east in its time zone than Los Angeles, so you can think of it as 8:30.oops, got that bit wrong. Still early for my taste, but not totally unreasonable.
Similarly, the Spanish famously do everything late. But do they? Madrid is west of London, but shares a time zone with Vienna. By the Sun, they're...still pretty late, but not quite as much as you might think.
The point is that human schedules are a self-organizing system, not under central control, and respond to what you might call "market forces", which in the long run will optimize them to the position of the Sun, not to a number on the clock. --Trovatore (talk) 06:23, 23 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Yes you don't have to be an astronomer or sextant user to have a desire for SI seconds with an extra second announced in advance to keep it approximately the closest second, it's unsurprising if pro-leap second astronomers and sextant users outnumbered by other pro-leap second humans through sheer numbers. Midnight at 1200 is insane, that's 12 hours wrong even Anchorage doesn't use California time for convenience (2 hours wrong) and they're used to it never getting dark then just a few hours of day. If the south horizon's high enough the city doesn't touch sunlight for weeks and the north horizon's only lit a few hours. Leap minutes would be an unneeded complication increasing the number of things that can't use civil time without extra work fixing it back to mean solar time of the multiple of 15 longitude. For instance Earth spins 11.7 longitude seconds in 0.78 time seconds (eyeballing the most it's been wrong so far on a graph, though they stopped jumping the gun so much over time so it doesn't get that bad anymore, probably they could not pad it at all without risk of it speeding from a 6 month forescast of c. 0.5 seconds to over their 0.9 second mandate in only 6 months). It would hardly affect sextant accuracy to use British Standard Time or Iceland Time (they're UTC all year), if it was leap minute even if it switched at 30 instead of 60 that'd be 7.5 minutes wrong (up to almost 9 land miles/14km). That's as inaccurate enough to put a very low island beyond the horizon from up to tens of yards up, several times the horizon distance of standing on a perfectly flat Earth and not even close to a passing score for sextants, eagle-eyed Tycho Brahe did 14 times better in the 1500s with just a 1.6 meter wood and his eyeballs. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 15:06, 22 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The non-computerized sextant user already has to carry charts based on the date and latitude and such, right? Let him keep one more table, which is the number of seconds to add or subtract in a given year. It doesn't change that much so he can probably just remember one extra number and it'll be good for some time. Problem solved. --Trovatore (talk) 19:44, 22 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Stop using UTC for computers. Problem solved. Or maybe leap seconds could be abolished and the second could be changed once it's crossed 0.6 seconds, to the value estimated to keep it less than 0.6 seconds wrong the longest. Would that be that bad? The scientists who need to specify this second is 86,400.002/86,400.000ths the early 2020s second probably have complex work already. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 22:15, 22 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
And pre-electric navigating tools will survive solar and military electromagnetic pulses that would melt all metal too many kilometers long and probably fuck all navigation that needs electricity. They'd survive an anti-satellite or computer virus war. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 22:31, 22 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
If you want to avoid leap seconds, but keep the local time in sync with the sun, you can just periodically shift all the time zone boundaries. Instead of a leap second, you’d shift the boundaries by 15 arc-seconds of longitude, which is about 300 m at the equator. You can call them leap-meters. I suspect this idea will not catch on. —Amble (talk) 15:52, 22 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
That would decouple time zones from longitudes that are multiples of 15 and no one would want to move the line till most of a metro area or at least rural county has passed through it. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 22:38, 22 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The biggest headache from leap seconds is that they are incorporated into things like Unix time / posix time that really ought to be a continuous count, or at least monotonic. At a leap second, the same timestamp gets replayed and no longer corresponds to a unique moment in time. Whatever we end up doing with leap seconds, leap minutes, and leap hours, all of the not-quite-continuous-count time coordinates need to be banished ASAP. Then you’d only need to worry about leap seconds when converting a single, continuous time coordinate into a formatted local time. —Amble (talk) 15:52, 22 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Stop using UTC for things where monotonicity is important and leave UTC as it is. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 22:38, 22 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Sweden maximized the inconvenience by procrastinating several times in different directions: Swedish calendar. First they decided that the big jump was too much to do all at once, so not to switch all at once, so they spread it out over the course of several decades, by simply skipping leap years. Then they got distracted and forgot to forget some of the leap years. Then they decided the whole thing was a lot of trouble, and switched back to the Julian calendar by observing a double-leap-year, which had a February 30. Not too many decades after that, Sweden finally switched to the Gregorian calendar in the usual way, by skipping a block of days all at once. Some of these decisions have got to be worse decisions than leap seconds... —Amble (talk) 20:28, 20 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I did say "one of the worst". --Trovatore (talk) 20:38, 20 May 2024 (UTC) [reply]
That’s fair! In the history of timekeeping there have been enough questionable decisions that it would be difficult to pick just one. —Amble (talk) 00:18, 21 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The advantage of stopped clocks is that they are right twice a day in all systems of timekeeping. --Lambiam 08:38, 21 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
A clock running backward is even better! —Tamfang (talk) 22:34, 21 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I wonder why no state did it by dropping each 31 for a couple of years. —Tamfang (talk) 22:35, 21 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
That would have put them into an analogous situation that Sweden faced. In those intervening years they would have been out of synch with both the Julian and the Gregorian, and thus out of synch with every country in the world that uses any version of the Western calendar. Hopeless confusion would have ensued. Referring to those dates in later years would have required a tripartite code: Old Style, New Style, and Our Special Temporary Style. Life's too short for that sort of shit. -- Jack of Oz[pleasantries] 22:58, 21 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
When archiving web pages with an option to switch between metric and imperial units, in many times the imperial units come to the archived version. Why does this happen? It may occur when the menus have imperial option in just one place. Which is the reason for that? --40bus (talk) 19:47, 20 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The archiving service loads the page from the web, not from your browser. It does not know what cookies you have set. --Lambiam 08:23, 21 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not posting on WP:RX because I don't need the articles, as I already have the material. I'm trying to link to the pages for use in an article on a footnote.
The Saturday Evening Post. 212 (42): 115. April 13, 1940.
@Viriditas: for Vogue: [30] requires a login to view the issue but it looks like there is no cost to create account RudolfRed (talk) 02:55, 22 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@RudolfRed: I've tried everything, but that Vogue site does not appear functional at all. Try logging in and reading an article from 1941. It doesn't work. Viriditas (talk) 23:39, 25 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Are there any recent books with not just contemporary human-scale units but many others all with conversions all listed in size order in sections named mass, acceleration, inverse length (several units like diopter are inverse length) etc (no wasting space blabbing for half the book instead of more kinds of units i.e. Meccan wine gallons and magnetic fluencivity). Maybe it could show multiple conversions per unit but one conversion per unit to either SI or one of the less obscure non-SI units would be sufficient. It'd be nice if the conversions had ~8-24 digits if unavoidable (some unit to different measurement system conversations could get an exact symbol with only a fqew digits (some without fractions or repeating decimal overlines like survey inch=(1/39.37) meters)). Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 04:30, 22 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I imagine such a book would struggle to find a publisher in the age of the internet. I did look through all the online unit converters on the first page of a DuckDuckGo search, and none of them cited any sources for their conversions, although several seemed very robust.I'm not sure how interested you are in premodern units (I'm unfamiliar with Meccan wine gallons and magnetic fluencivity), but if you're looking at premodern units you should keep in mind that how we think of them in the present is usually an approximation of what their original value was, even if the value was rigorously defined at some point instead of a "just about". The recent book Eratosthenes and the Measurement of the Earth's Circumference (c.230 BCE) (Matthew, 2023) devotes an entire chapter to figuring out the size of the unit used in the ancient experiment. Meanwhile I've at least twice had cause to cite Loewe, Michael (1961). "The Measurement of Grain during the Han Period". T'oung Pao. Second Series. 49 (1/2): 64–95. doi:10.1163/156853262X00020. JSTOR4527501. That article goes into significant depth about the changing value of different measurements of volume and where the historical sources allow us to estimate the measurements against each other and against modern units. Sometimes we get lucky and there's an extant prototype that allows us to measure premodern units exactly, but much of the time it takes research by subject matter experts laying out careful arguments blabbing half the book to arrive at a good estimate, and 8–24 digits is going to end up in the territory of false precision.Anyway it's likely that if you cite two online unit converters in your calculations no one will challenge the results. Folly Mox (talk) 08:52, 22 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The subject of reference is Metrology that Wikipedia divides into sections each of which wastes space blabbing gives encyclopedia-worthy information, not least the essential historical evolution of units that overshadows any anachronistic conversion between ancient and modern units. The Metre is an example of a unit that has been redefined several times since it began in 1791 as Earth's circumference/40,000. Philvoids (talk) 12:59, 22 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Wikipedia has articles for many units with conversion to metric and American, unit systems like SI or Ancient Egyptian with conversions to metric American and other units of the system the article's about, categories of units of the same type like area units, articles on quantities like area with less obscure units noted along with some cross-system conversions like hectare to or from acre. But not really like that book I saw. It probably didn't have every possible conversion factor but that means room for more units and you could derive any unit pair conversion factor from what's on the page anyway. I'm sure there's a massive multi-volume book covering all of metrology (including detailed care instructions for the one true kilogram and extremely dry statistical error propagationolgy) which I could use to find all the info in that book I saw (maybe requiring me to read the entire book and perform data entry just to get a table of every mentioned length unit and its size in SI ranked by size) but a book like that book I saw could be hundreds of US$ cheaper. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 18:54, 22 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Annual personal organizer diaries are usually padded with extra reference information such as maps and some common unit conversions such as degrees Celsius <-> Fahrenheit, metric <-> imperial units, etc. The most recent that will be for year 2025 are probably being printed now. Philvoids (talk) 17:49, 24 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Did the position "Senior Secretary of Cadres for CPSU" Existededit
Hello, I'm researching historical positions within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) because Andrei Kirilenko (politician) page, he held a post called "Senior Secretary of Cadres." However, I haven't been able to find much information about it. Did this position officially exist within the CPSU, and if so, what were its responsibilities? Any guidance or references would be greatly appreciated. Thank you! SleepyJoe42 (talk) 14:37, 22 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The article on Kirilenko on the Russian Wikipedia mentions many secretarial position in which he served, including serving on the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the CPSU, but nothing resembling this specific designation. The Secretariat oversaw the day-to-day operations of the Party, and specific areas of work were assigned to its members, such as agriculture, but I suspect this was not reflected in a title. Moreover, according to the Russian article on Kirilenko, he oversaw industry, capital construction, transport and communications. The article Секретариат ЦК КПСС states that Kirilenko served as co-Second Secretary next to Mikhail Andreyevich Suslov. --Lambiam 21:49, 23 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
So far, apples means Indigenous peoples acting like white, coconuts means South Asian people acting like white, Oreo cookies means Black people like white and bananas means East and Southeast Asian acting like white, but is there a term for Middle Eastern people, Arabs, Iranians, Afghanis, Central Asians and Turkish peoples and others acting like white people? Donmust90 Donmust90 (talk) 18:11, 22 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
There does not seem to be a specific term for MENA individuals acting or identifying as white. 136.54.106.120 (talk) 23:40, 22 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Racially speaking, Arabs, Iranians, Afghanis, Central Asians and Turkish are all Caucasians. ←Baseball BugsWhat's up, Doc?carrots→ 03:22, 23 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Some Central Asians look far more similar to Japanese than Caucasus. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 04:58, 23 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
They are? What do Arabs have to do with the Caucasus mountains? Zanahary (talk) 06:20, 23 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
See Caucasian race, specifically the sentence in the lede that says "In the United States, the root term Caucasian is still in use as a synonym for white or of European, Middle Eastern, or North African ancestry, a usage that has been criticized." I'm sure you're aware of this usage and are just pretending that it doesn't exist. Whether you like it or not, it's still a valid usage. --Viennese Waltz 07:06, 23 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'm sure you're aware of this usage and are just pretending that it doesn't exist Girl Zanahary (talk) 10:15, 23 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
In my travels, I have heard: Oreos for blacks in the U.S. and Bounty bar for blacks in the U.K., Coconuts for Hawaiians, Bananas for Chinese and Japanese, and apple for Native Americans. Googling, I see that coconut is used in Central/South America, many of the Pacific Islands, and Indonesia. There is no reason to assume it wouldn't be used in India as well as India is (I believe) the largest producers of coconuts. I want to make sure it is obvious that all of these terms are offensive. Just because some people say them does not mean that any person should use them, even if it seems funny. I used to think it was OK. I do not get offended. So, I was called a lot of names from silly ones like "round-eye" in China to "oyinbo" in Nigeria. But, I was told that because I laughed, it made the person who said those terms comfortable with saying them to other people who could be offended. So, instead of laughing along, I began asking others to be more polite. 75.136.148.8 (talk) 15:14, 23 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
They wrote in the question what it means (Black people acting like white), so why ask? --Lambiam 07:46, 24 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I was talking to the IP, not to the OP. Oreo in plain language means "black on the outside, white on the inside", which is a harsh assessment, not intended to be funny. Which leads me to question whether the IP really understands the concept. ←Baseball BugsWhat's up, Doc?carrots→ 18:48, 24 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
(1) You didn't indent, so you appeared to be addressing the OP, not the IP. C'mon, you've been here for 20 years, you know how the indentation convention works.
(2) The IP geolocates to South Carolina, so (assuming no VPN), probably does know what "Oreo" indicates. Hell, I know and I live on a different continent. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.2.67.173 (talk) 22:12, 24 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I failed to count correctly, but my indentions were well-intentioned. As for SC, considering who they keep voting for, I wouldn't make any assumptions about their intelligence level. ←Baseball BugsWhat's up, Doc?carrots→ 22:35, 24 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I see nothing in the IP's post that makes me question their understanding of the terms they are using. Making assumptions about someone's political leanings based on nothing more than the location from where they are posting does not suggest an excess of brightness. --Lambiam 05:28, 25 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The IP brought up the notion the term "Oreo" somehow being considered "funny". It ain't. And as for being from SC, someone else brought that up too. I question the original premise "non-white acting like white". I don't think that's sufficient. ←Baseball BugsWhat's up, Doc?carrots→ 07:56, 25 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
You did read the question, correct? The question brought up oreo. You did read my response, correct? My response stated that it is offensive even if some people think it is funny. So, now it appears that it is important for you to frame an entire state as stupid and racist to save face. I feel that says a lot more about you than it does me. 75.136.148.8 (talk) 13:16, 27 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Many people. When I was growing up, other kids called me oreo (among many other offensive terms like injun, redskin, and chief) to be mean. They laughed because many kids think being mean to kids who are different is funny. My friends also called me oreo specifically to be funny because they felt it was a way of letting me know that they don't care that my dad was Cherokee instead of black. I am not claiming that it was a full stand-up routine on HBO. I am only stating that they laughed and, in my opinion, people tend to laugh at things that they think are funny. Similarly, if some kids found sticks on the playground, they wanted to play cowboys and Indians, which meant chasing me around the playground while throwing sticks at me and laughing. Because they laughed, I assume they found it funny. I still feel you haven't read my comment above. I feel that I clearly state that even though someone might think it is funny, it isn't. It is offensive. 75.136.148.8 (talk) 19:24, 28 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
You need to identify the which ones were those calling you so, and rationalize for each or each pack a conclusion, otherwise you're just propagating the bad spell ( Voodoo Ch'le ) --Askedonty (talk) 21:04, 28 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
There's an airline called Graff Aviation that I'd like to find out more about, but it seems to have a minimal internet presence. It doesn't have an article on here. There are plenty of photos of its planes, see [31] and [32] for example. But it doesn't seem to have a website and I can't find any information on who owns it or what kind of services it provides. Can anyone provide some more information, please? Thank you, --Viennese Waltz 17:39, 26 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I don't know how a bag would ask you something. However, per Recycling, what you're describing would be "reuse". Recycling typically involves breaking down the source into component materials. ←Baseball BugsWhat's up, Doc?carrots→ 03:45, 29 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Technically, it would be repurposing. Reusing is simply employing something for its designated purpose multiple times, repurposing is finding a new use for it.--User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 11:27, 29 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Assuming the framed bag is "art", it seems like it would be upcycling. Matt Deres (talk) 17:42, 30 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Naively-cascaded biquad bandpasses vs Butterworth bandpass filtersedit
What's the point of using Butterworth filter design for IIR filter bank spectrum analyzer if simply stacking biquads (w/ exact same properties for each stages) many times (which is what I've implemented in "Analog-style analyzer" mode on this filterbank-based audio spectrum project) is good enough? And what are advantages and disadvantages of naively cascading biquads over using "real" Butterworth bandpass filters for filter bank-based audio spectrum analyzers? And BTW, what is a name for IIR filter design where steeper rolloff is achieved simply by stacking the exact same filter over and over? 114.5.214.236 (talk) 05:50, 29 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Well a Butterworth filter is optimum with spectrum flatness. A design engineer may want to get the "best" out of something, or may just want to do it as cheap or simple as possible. Other consideration such as whether the components are available or stable, or delay is too much can also become relevant. If it's implemented in software then other aspects may come in, such as intellectual property, but component values will be irrelevant. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 22:30, 29 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Graeme Bartlett True, but what I'm concerned about is more of choice of filter types (e.g. Butterworth, Bessel, and even Linkwitz-Riley) for filter bank-based spectral analysis like 1/3rd octave band spectrum analyzer. BTW, I go for the "cheaper" or more precisely, simpler route, which is simply stacking the bandpass filters many times because I'm not an audio engineer (at least a good one) and the result is just good enough anyway if you don't care about details of the bandpass filter's properties. 114.5.208.150 (talk) 23:44, 29 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Stacking will not optimise the edge roll-off and may have complicated phase shifting. But for your application it doesn't matter. So simpl;icity and cheapness are more important. Perhaps there is an IC that can do the job. If you can find it, it could be very cheap and simple. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 00:55, 30 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Graeme Bartlett and Philvoids: Yeah (considering stacking/cascading two time-domain filters is equivalent of squaring its frequency response) but obviously, since this question is related to this relevant CodePen project, I'm talking about this filter bank design implemented in software (which is digital obviously) strictly speaking. 114.5.211.132 (talk) 04:06, 30 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Hello. If I remember correctly, for a certain period, the Tango was also the official ball of the old European Cup finals (the current Champions League). Since when and for how many years? Thank you very much. 93.148.11.229 (talk) 19:52, 29 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Long ago, before the invention of In-flight entertainment, did the airlines show projected movies on their red-eye flights? I think it's tolerable because people were given masks and earphones. -- Toytoy (talk) 01:45, 30 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Toytoy: How long ago? The article you link says in-flight entertainment began in 1936. It also says After World War II, food and drink services were offered, and movies were projected onto big screens viewable by all passengers on long flights. You can read more about in-flight movies in the History section of that article. RudolfRed (talk) 03:21, 30 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I suggest the original poster was talking about seat-back screens with individual entertainment selections. --142.112.143.8 (talk) 05:25, 30 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
From my memory, the overnight flight would stop showing movies at some point in the night, and turn lights down low. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 04:31, 30 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Before the invention of seatback LCD monitor, technically, you may still watch movies without disturbing others at night, as long as people are wearing sleep masks and earphones. I just don't know if they DID SHOW MOVIES alll night long on a red-eye flight. If not, people who don't like to sleep may find it difficult to pass the time. -- Toytoy (talk) 11:59, 30 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
In the 1980s, movies were projected onto large pop-down screens but without sound (you had to use earphones to listen to it). So it wasn't too disturbing for passengers who wanted to sleep or read or whatever. As Graeme Bartlett mentions above, only one movie would typically be shown on an overnight flight, after which the cabin lights were dimmed until breakfast was served before landing. This is all from personal recollection Xuxl (talk) 15:35, 30 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Your recollection is correct. Viriditas (talk) 21:49, 1 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It is a tradition that on the ‘ears’ of the trophy, ribbons in the social colours of the winning team are wrapped. In the case of Sampdoria's success at Wembley in 1992, what colour ribbons would they have been? One has to take into account the fact that Samp, that evening, was playing in the visiting team's uniform. Is it plausible to think of a pair of white and blue ribbons, like the uniform that night? Thank you very much. 93.148.11.229 (talk) 22:27, 30 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
One can hope to move this out of the area of speculation by looking at earlier cases in which the winning team played in away colours. But how old is this tradition? For the 1991 European Cup final, photographs show the winning team hold up a cup with bare ears.[33] Also for the 1990 European Cup final, the captain of the winning team is seen to hold up a trophy with unadorned ears.[34] --Lambiam 05:43, 31 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Websearching images for "1992 European Cup Final trophy" finds images of the winning team Barcelona with the trophy adorned with ribbons of their colours (blue and red, although 1992 European Cup final misleadingly shows a graphic of a mostly orange strip), so certainly had Sampdoria won it would have borne their colours instead.
Whether it would have been their (then) home or (then) away colours that they actually played in remains unresolved, but I note that, according to their article UC Sampdoria (is it correct?), their current home colours are (mostly) blue shirt and white shorts, and their away strip is white shirt and blue shorts. If that was also the case in 1992 then the ribbons would have been white and blue regardless.
Perhaps the OP knows, and will kindly tell us, what Sampdoria's home strip was in 1992? {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.2.67.173 (talk) 12:42, 31 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The colours do not change, so the substance does not change. Sampdoria's home uniform consisted of a blue shirt and white shorts. At Wemblely, it was simply the other way around, the colours of the ribbons would not change. Thanks a lot guys.
I saw those words today and dont know the difference. What is the difference of a curvy, voluptuous, thick and athletic body shape?edit
I saw those words today and dont know the difference.
What is the difference of a curvy, voluptuous, thick and athletic body shape?
Give me picture examples to make simple as google
PS: If one of those ( curvy, voluptuous, thick ) is mistaken with fat, show a fat person to show the difference.177.63.95.122 (talk) 21:23, 31 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The words "curvy" and "voluptuous" imply that the individual is female ("curvaceous" is also used). To be fair to the OP, his native tongue is most likely Portuguese, where the corresponding words may have a wider meaning. Example: Boletim do Instituto Menezes Bragança[35] (on page 148):
...Índia conferiram a sua obra "originalidade e vigor que o aproximam ora do lirismo místico de Tagore, ora do satanismo voluptuoso de Beaudelaire".
...India conferred on his work "originality and vigour that approximate it now to the mystical lyricism of Tagore, now to the voluptuous Satanism of Beaudelaire".
OP, all you have to do is open up a generative AI website. It will create those images for you to look at. I could be wrong, but in the US, curvy, voluptuous, and thick are generally used as synonyms, even though each can have their own separate definitions and differences. I remember reading that there's also a certain amount of cultural overlay. For example, "curvy" is considered body positive. "Voluptuous" implies a somewhat larger figure, but having just looked into it a bit closer, I see it is indeed used in the same way as curvy. Athletic generally entails thin and slightly muscular or defined, with a much smaller top and bottom. As for the term "fat", I think the term you're looking for is "obese". I think what you are really getting it is, can a curvy, voluptuous, and thick woman also be labeled obese? And the answer is most obviously, yes. More interestingly is to examine similar terms for men, which hasn't been done enough in recent years except for the somewhat newer subject of the dad bod. Viriditas (talk) 21:41, 1 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
For item 1, you can probably rule out soccer matches. For item 2, roast camel is pretty good sized. Meanwhile, bacteriophage viruses eat bacteria, which are pretty small. ←Baseball BugsWhat's up, Doc?carrots→ 01:57, 1 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Further, cursory Internet searches reveal 3) 32 years, for Victor Manuel Gerena and 5) supposedly around 10 million, for Hamster Kombat (the figure is corroborated here, but there isn't an easy way to definitively verify that this is indeed the highest ever achieved). I don't know that there's a meaningful answer to question 4 -- it depends on how you define "type"/"cuisine" and on what scale. There are apparently over twice as many restaurants in China than in any other country, and Chinese restaurants are fairly popular in India (more so than vice-versa), so if you consider "Chinese" to be a single "type" of restaurant that's probably a good guess. (fugues) (talk) 05:15, 1 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Resolved
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— AnonMoos (talk) 21:05, 22 May 2024 (UTC)
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